Looking for the Highest-Performance Rust Backend Stack: Actix-web vs Hyper+Tokio (and any lesser-known high-performance frameworks?)

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Hello everyone,
I’m working on a performance-critical backend project in Rust — the API needs to handle extremely high throughput and very low latency. Because the project is sensitive, performance is my absolute top priority.

Right now, I’m stuck choosing between Actix-web and building my stack manually with Hyper + Tokio. I already understand both approaches, but I’m trying to figure out which one realistically delivers the highest performance possible in real production scenarios.

My questions to the community:

  1. For maximum performance, which approach tends to win today:

Actix-web (with its actor system & optimizations)

or a fully custom Hyper + Tokio setup?

  1. Are there any lesser-known frameworks, libraries, or runtime tools in Rust that outperform both for API servers? I don't mind complexity — I only care about stable, extreme performance.

  2. For those who have built high-load APIs, what stack did you end up using, and what were the results?

Any benchmarks, experience, or deep technical explanations are highly appreciated.
Thanks a lot!

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Why not axum instead of hand-rolling your own hyper + tokio server?

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I'd use axum. You can look at the tricks they use for techempower to get the absolute maximum performance

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There are also backfork (how do you call fork of a project that's made by the original author after he was expelled from his own project?) of actix-web, ntex. It's, most likely, faster because Nikolay Kim is obsessed with speed… whether do you want to trust guy who tells you: “I need unit test that shows UB” and “ this patch is boring” to patch that fixes said UB… is another story.

You may get a nice bonus and if you plan to leave quickly enough and don't mind if the company that employs that service would go after Knight Capital, then it could the best choice…