I am using Traefik as the ingress controller for my Kubernetes setup. I decided to run some performance test for my application but I faced a huge difference when I sent the requests through the Traefik.

The test consists of sending 10K request in parallel and the application returned the compiled result and based on the logs of my application it needs around 5 milliseconds to process one request. The results for the performance test are as below:

• Native application: Execution time in milliseconds: 61062
• Application on Kubernetes (without going through Traefik and just using its IP): Execution time in milliseconds: 62337
• Application on Kubernetes and using Traefik: Execution time in milliseconds: 159499

My question is why this huge difference exists and is there a way to reduce it (except adding more replicas).

I am using these yaml files for setting up Traefik:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containous/traefik/v1.7/examples/k8s/traefik-rbac.yaml
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containous/traefik/v1.7/examples/k8s/traefik-ds.yaml