Cilium — Benchmarks
Scope
Performance characteristics, scaling limits, and resource consumption for Cilium.
| Feature |
Throughput |
Latency |
Notes |
| Pod-to-Pod (same node) |
40+ Gbps |
10-20us |
XDP native |
| Pod-to-Pod (cross node) |
9.5+ Gbps |
50-100us |
VXLAN/Geneve |
| Service load balancing |
9+ Gbps |
20-50us |
Maglev hashing |
| kube-proxy replacement |
+5-15% vs iptables |
-20-40% vs iptables |
eBPF socket-level |
Scaling Limits
| Dimension |
Limit |
Notes |
| Nodes per cluster |
5,000+ |
Tested by Isovalent |
| Endpoints per node |
1,000+ |
eBPF map capacity |
| Network policies |
100,000+ |
CiliumNetworkPolicy |
| Identities (security) |
65,535 |
Per-cluster identity space |
Resource Consumption
| Cluster Size |
Agent CPU |
Agent Memory |
Operator Memory |
| < 100 nodes |
100-200m |
256Mi |
128Mi |
| 100-500 nodes |
200-500m |
512Mi |
256Mi |
| 500+ nodes |
500m-1 |
1Gi+ |
512Mi |