Poor performance in synthetic benchmarks

[jonathanhefner]

Link to the code that reproduces this issue

https://github.com/jonathanhefner/next-techempower-benchmarks

To Reproduce

I recently submitted Next.js to be included in the upcoming round of TechEmpower Web Framework Benchmarks (see TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks#9506). The results have not been publicly released yet, but you can preview them.

Compared to other frameworks, Next.js performance is unexpectedly poor. For example, here are the results for all Node-based frameworks for a simple API endpoint benchmark:

The code for that endpoint is just

export async function GET() {
  return Response.json({ message: "Hello, World!" })
}

So I believe the poor performance is due to Next.js overhead.

Current vs. Expected behavior

Currently, Next.js performance is much worse than other frameworks across multiple types of synthetic benchmarks. For example, see also the "Plaintext" benchmark results and "Single query" benchmark results.

Synthetic benchmarks aren't necessarily representative of real-world performance, but I expect Next.js to at least be competitive with other web frameworks.

Provide environment information

Operating System:
  Platform: linux
  Arch: x64

Binaries:
  Node: 22.13.0

Relevant Packages:
  next: 15.1.3
  react: 19.0.0
  react-dom: 19.0.0

Which area(s) are affected? (Select all that apply)

Performance

Which stage(s) are affected? (Select all that apply)

next start (local), Other (Deployed)

Additional context

In case it is relevant, this is the Dockerfile for the app.

See https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=environment for benchmark environment details.