Performance

This page collects the measurements the project has published, says where each comes from, and explains how to measure your own suite and which levers move it. All numbers were taken on Apple silicon Macs. No Linux numbers have been published yet.

Published measurements

Per test

The reference flow is the "closes an open position" test of TOS, the application Lightningpanda was first built to test, run against a TOS-shaped app in the repository's benchmark site. Median wall time per test:

How the test is driven	Time per test	Source
Native LP.run, booted page, 4 connections, back to back	2.75 ms	bench/results/lp-tos-e501cef
Native LP.run, fresh page	8.6 ms	bench/results/lp-tos-e501cef
Stock Playwright over CDP, same browser	34.2 ms	bench/results/lp-tos-e501cef
Playwright module (@povio/lightning-panda/playwright), Playwright code as TOS writes it, fresh page	14.7 ms	package README
Stock Playwright over CDP, same flow	41-44 ms	package README

Conditions for lp-tos-e501cef: Apple M1 Max, 10 cores, release build, 5 rounds of 15 samples, on a busy machine (load average about 13), so differences under 10-15% are noise.

What the table shows: the same browser is about 12 times faster per test when the whole scenario is one native command on a booted page, and about 3 times faster when Playwright code runs through the Playwright module.

Fork mode

From docs/ARCHITECTURE.md, M1 Max, release build:

Measurement	Result
An app whose startup runs 0.8 s of JavaScript, handed to a new connection already booted	about 20 ms
Connect to an evaluated expression in a booted page, spare fork waiting (8 MB test app)	3.6 ms
Module precompilation on the full TOS suite (2,160 tests): instructions per page	3,079 M without, 2,816 M with (-8.5%)

Memory

Measurement	Result	Source
20-test loop on a 2 MB app, memory released on page close	plateaus at 275 MB instead of 323 MB	repository README

Against upstream Lightpanda

A matched HTTP workload (50 navigations and 20 context cycles, three fresh processes per binary, 2026-10-17) in bench/results/http-cpu-d673567:

Median of 3	Lightpanda (upstream)	Lightningpanda
50 navigations, browser CPU	283.5 ms	77.9 ms
20 context cycles, browser CPU	73.2 ms	49.5 ms
Peak resident memory	32.0 MB	15.9 MB

This workload has no DOM interaction, subresources or TLS. It measures the navigation path, not whole-browser parity.

Measure your own suite

Wall time on a shared laptop or CI runner is noisy. Use these, from cheapest to most precise:

1. Run the suite twice with each setup and compare totals. Alternate the setups (A, B, A, B) so machine load hits both equally.
2. Read RunResult.ms. Every page.run reply carries the time spent in the browser. Compare it with the wall time of the test to see how much goes to your test code, seeding and the network.
3. Read lp.stats. It counts pages taken booted (prepared), taken while still booting (preparedBooting) and booted for the test (fresh). Many fresh pages mean the pool is too small for the pace of your tests.
4. Measure CPU, not wall time, under load. On macOS, /usr/bin/time -l prints the CPU time and peak memory of a command and the child processes it waited for. In fork mode, LIGHTNINGPANDA_FORK_STATS=<file> logs each forked page's CPU time, page faults and instructions.

/usr/bin/time -l bunx lightningpanda e2e e2e --concurrency 8

When comparing against Chrome, compare the same tests on the same machine, with the same concurrency, in the same session.

Levers

In rough order of effect:

Lever	What it removes	How
Native runs	Round trips and client-side polling: one command per scenario instead of one per call	Rewrite slow tests as page.run([...]) (Porting from Playwright)
Profiles	The app's boot from each test	lp.profile() and lp.page({ as, route }), or use.lightningpanda.boot in the Playwright module (Profiles)
Fork mode	Boot cost entirely, and per-test cleanup	serve --fork, or lightningpanda e2e, which uses it automatically (Fork mode)
Several connections	Waiting behind another page's boot on the same thread	connect(ws, { connections: 4 }) in thread mode
Static serving	Your dev server's response time, and its CPU	--static http://localhost:3000=dist serves a production build from disk (Serving a build)
setup snapshots	Repeated sign-in and navigation steps	setup and base profiles in fork mode
Seeding through the API	Clicking through forms to create test data	create data with your API, then assert in the UI

What does not help: raising timeouts, adding waits, and splitting a scenario into one run per step. Each extra run is a round trip, and request checks only see their own run.

Profile-guided optimization

The repository has a profile-guided optimization (PGO) build script for source builds, trained on a Playwright suite, a CSS benchmark and, optionally, your own workload. On an M1 Max it measured 5-7% less CPU on the Playwright suite and 5-16% on DOM edit and layout loops, with PDF output byte-identical. The npm package's binaries are not built with PGO. See the repository README if you build from source.