Linkerd — Benchmarks
Scope
Performance characteristics, scaling limits, and resource consumption for Linkerd.
| Metric |
Linkerd2-proxy |
Envoy (Istio) |
Notes |
| Latency added (P50) |
< 1ms |
1-2ms |
Rust vs C++ |
| Latency added (P99) |
1-3ms |
3-10ms |
Under load |
| Memory per proxy |
15-25MB |
50-100MB |
Significantly lighter |
| CPU per proxy |
10-50m |
50-100m |
Lighter workload |
| Throughput |
95-98% native |
90-95% native |
Minimal overhead |
Control Plane Resources
| Mesh Size (pods) |
Destination CPU |
Destination Memory |
Identity Memory |
| 100 |
100m |
128Mi |
64Mi |
| 500 |
200m |
256Mi |
128Mi |
| 2,000 |
500m |
512Mi |
256Mi |
Scaling Limits
| Dimension |
Limit |
Notes |
| Pods in mesh |
10,000+ |
Per cluster |
| Services |
5,000+ |
|
| Endpoints per service |
5,000 |
EndpointSlice support |
| Certificate rotation |
Auto, 24h default |
Zero-downtime |