Falcon benchmarks: say what the numbers can and cannot support

[pftg]

Content-only, one post — our #2 organic page (31 clicks / 2,898 impressions via the alias).

Verdict: not the same defect class, and here is why that matters

After removing fabricated figures from two posts today, the obvious move was to delete these tables too. That would have been wrong.

Two things argue the numbers are real:

1. Internally coherent. Falcon shows 102ms against a forced 100ms I/O delay — exactly what a working async server does. Puma's degradation is proportional to its worker-slot count (4 workers × 5 threads = 20 slots) against 400 concurrent users.
2. The hello-world table shows Agoo beating Falcon on every column — 7,000 req/s vs 6,000, less memory, less CPU. Nobody fabricates a competitor beating their own recommendation.

Deleting numbers on suspicion is as bad as inventing them.

What is actually wrong

Defect	Evidence
No load generator named	0 hits for wrk/ab/k6/oha/autocannon anywhere in 5,375 words
No date recorded	0 hits
App under test not described	—
Action Cable listed as a web server	It is a Rails component that runs on one

The sibling post falcon-web-server-production-tuning-benchmarks names its tooling and has a Sources section. The standard exists in this repo; this post missed it.

The fix

Numbers reframed as indicative rather than reproducible, with the gap named explicitly rather than papered over, and readers pointed at the tuning post for figures that carry a method.

The Agoo row is now called out in prose as running against us — leaving it unremarked reads as an oversight rather than a disclosure.

Action Cable → Action Cable on Puma, which makes the row mean something.

Why not just delete the tables

They are the post's substance and there is no positive evidence they are false. The honest repair is to state what they can support. That is a different judgement from the Solid Queue table, which was arithmetically impossible, and the 450/120/73 triple, which appeared verbatim across two unrelated stacks.

Gates

bin/hugo-build clean · bin/rake test:links 0 errors · post in the crawl · 0 em dashes

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_016PUkwFTsiv7EB2DYKogbpg

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