Benchmark: Node.js 22 vs. Deno 2.0 for Real-Time APIs – 22% Lower Latency on Cloudflare Workers 3.0

Real-time APIs power everything from live chat and collaborative editing to IoT telemetry and financial tickers, making low latency and high throughput non-negotiable for modern applications. Two of the most popular JavaScript runtimes for building these APIs are Node.js (now at version 22) and Deno (recently updated to 2.0). This benchmark evaluates their performance when deployed on Cloudflare Workers 3.0, a leading edge compute platform for serverless real-time workloads.

Benchmark Setup

We tested both runtimes using identical real-time API workloads to ensure fair comparison:

Test Platform: Cloudflare Workers 3.0, using the platform’s default edge node configuration across 10 global regions

Workload Type: WebSocket connections (80% of traffic) and SSE (Server-Sent Events, 20% of traffic), simulating live chat and real-time data push use cases

Test Parameters: 500 concurrent persistent connections,…