← Tuesday, October 13, 2026Performance & OSDeep dive

curl performance tests drive faster encoding and decoding

daniel.haxx.se 3 min read Editor score 7/10

The curl team says its base64 encoder is more than twice as fast, decoding is 40% faster, and URL encoding and decoding are each more than twice as fast. The gains show how ongoing performance tests can expose worthwhile improvements in widely used infrastructure.

What

curl’s performance tests have prompted optimizations to encoding, parsing, formatting, and internal data structures.

How

The changes speed up several routines and shrink per-transfer and per-connection structs; the tested 512MB download case also uses fewer allocations.

Why it matters

Profiling and tracking allocations exposed improvements in common library paths, showing how targeted measurement can guide system-level optimization.

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