Calico — Benchmarks
Scope
Performance characteristics, scaling limits, and resource consumption for Calico.
| Dataplane |
Throughput |
Latency |
CPU Overhead |
| iptables |
8-9 Gbps |
100us |
High (10k+ rules) |
| eBPF |
9.5+ Gbps |
50us |
Low |
| Windows HNS |
5-7 Gbps |
200us |
Medium |
Scaling Limits
| Dimension |
iptables |
eBPF |
| Network policies |
1,000 |
10,000+ |
| Endpoints per node |
200 |
500+ |
| Total policies cluster-wide |
5,000 |
50,000+ |
| Policy evaluation time |
1-10ms |
< 1ms |
| Policies |
Felix Sync Time |
Memory Usage |
| 100 |
< 1s |
100MB |
| 1,000 |
2-5s |
300MB |
| 10,000 |
10-30s |
1GB+ |