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Terraform — Benchmarks

Scope

Performance characteristics, scaling limits, and resource consumption for Terraform.

Plan/Apply Performance

State Size Plan Time Apply Time Memory
50 resources < 5s 1-3m 100MB
500 resources 15-60s 5-15m 500MB
2,000 resources 2-10m 15-45m 2GB
10,000 resources 10-30m 1-3h 8GB+

Provider API Limits

Provider Rate Limit Impact on Large Plans
AWS 20-100 req/s (varies by API) Parallelism > 10 may hit limits
Azure 12,000 req/h per subscription Large plans need throttling
GCP 10-100 req/s Moderate limitation

Module Performance

Module Count Init Time Plan Overhead
5 5-10s Negligible
20 10-30s 10-20% slower
50+ 30-120s Consider splitting

State File Benchmarks

Metric Small (< 1MB) Medium (1-10MB) Large (10-100MB)
Read < 1s 1-5s 5-30s
Write < 1s 1-5s 5-30s
Plan (full) < 30s 30s-5m 5-30m