Istio — Benchmarks
Scope
Performance characteristics, scaling limits, and resource consumption for Istio.
| Metric |
Sidecar (Envoy) |
Ambient (ztunnel) |
Native |
| Latency (P50) |
+1-2ms |
+0.5ms |
Baseline |
| Latency (P99) |
+3-10ms |
+1-3ms |
Baseline |
| Throughput |
90-95% native |
95-98% native |
100% |
| Memory per pod |
+50-100Mi |
0 (shared) |
0 |
| CPU per pod |
+50-100m |
0 (shared) |
0 |
Control Plane Scaling
| Pods in Mesh |
istiod CPU |
istiod Memory |
Config Push Time |
| 100 |
200m |
512Mi |
< 1s |
| 1,000 |
1-2 |
2-4Gi |
1-5s |
| 5,000 |
4-8 |
8-16Gi |
5-15s |
| 10,000 |
8-16 |
16-32Gi |
15-30s |
Scaling Limits
| Dimension |
Limit |
Notes |
| Pods per mesh |
10,000+ |
Single istiod |
| Services |
5,000+ |
xDS push complexity |
| Namespaces |
1,000+ |
|
| VirtualServices |
5,000+ |
Envoy route table size |
| Gateways |
100+ |
Resource consumption |