And Rocket is surprisingly slow. Is this because it's not async yet?

It is higher-level than actix, though it's still surprising to see it as low as it is. I'm curious what the story is there too. It is significantly higher than Express and Flask, though it's lower than raw NodeJS and PHP.

I guess maybe these benchmarks only test the overhead of the framework itself, and ignore the benefits of having your business logic and middleware written in a faster language? The tests for node and PHP would pretty much only be running battle-tested native code if that's what's going on

Rocket prior to 0.5 was not async and thus does not really preform well in those benchmarks.

0.5 however is async and is currently in rc, when it is released I would expect it to climb up the list a little bit.

Is there info on when the 0.5 is supposed to be released? I don't see anything on the Github except that the only issue left on the 0.5 milestone is updating the readme.

Some comments about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26069195

Nice, good info. v0.5 (currently in RC) is the stable/async version mentioned. Excited to see the benchmark get updated for that version.