Benchmarks

How fast is FerrFlow?

Side-by-side comparison against the JavaScript ecosystem release tools, measured with hyperfine on the same hardware, the same commits, and the same fixtures. Numbers refresh on every FerrFlow release.

Last update: June 6, 2026 · ferrflow v5.2.0 · binary size 8.0 MB

How we measure

Hyperfine with 3 warmup runs and 10 timed runs per (fixture × tool × command) cell. Median latency reported.
Peak RSS via /usr/bin/time -v on a single subsequent run.
Fixtures are generated from FerrLabs/Fixtures with deterministic conventional-commit history (no flaky inputs).
All commands are no-op-ish dry runs: ferrflow check, semantic-release --dry-run --no-ci, changesets status, standard-version --dry-run, etc. So we're comparing the planning cost, not the IO cost of actually mutating files.
Reproducible — the full pipeline is in FerrLabs/Benchmarks; results land as artifacts on every main push and in each release notes.

`check`

Fixture	ferrflow
Single package	16 ms 21.1 MB
Monorepo · small (5 packages)	17 ms 18.9 MB
Monorepo · medium (20 packages)	60 ms 19.0 MB
Monorepo · large (50 packages)	1.06 s 29.2 MB
Monorepo · 50 packages × 5k commits	525 ms 25.1 MB
Monorepo · 100 packages × 1k commits	112 ms 23.1 MB

`release --dry-run`

Fixture	ferrflow
Single package	16 ms 21.1 MB
Monorepo · small (5 packages)	17 ms 19.2 MB
Monorepo · medium (20 packages)	60 ms 19.1 MB
Monorepo · large (50 packages)	1.06 s 29.0 MB
Monorepo · 50 packages × 5k commits	523 ms 25.3 MB
Monorepo · 100 packages × 1k commits	113 ms 23.1 MB

`tag`

Fixture	ferrflow
Single package	4 ms 12.2 MB
Monorepo · small (5 packages)	5 ms 12.2 MB
Monorepo · medium (20 packages)	14 ms 12.3 MB
Monorepo · large (50 packages)	220 ms 18.3 MB
Monorepo · 50 packages × 5k commits	105 ms 14.2 MB
Monorepo · 100 packages × 1k commits	26 ms 12.3 MB

`validate`

Fixture	ferrflow
Single package	2 ms 12.1 MB
Monorepo · small (5 packages)	2 ms 12.2 MB
Monorepo · medium (20 packages)	3 ms 12.1 MB
Monorepo · large (50 packages)	4 ms 12.3 MB
Monorepo · 50 packages × 5k commits	3 ms 11.9 MB
Monorepo · 100 packages × 1k commits	3 ms 12.2 MB

`version`

Fixture	ferrflow
Single package	2 ms 12.1 MB
Monorepo · small (5 packages)	2 ms 12.1 MB
Monorepo · medium (20 packages)	3 ms 12.2 MB
Monorepo · large (50 packages)	4 ms 12.3 MB
Monorepo · 50 packages × 5k commits	3 ms 11.9 MB
Monorepo · 100 packages × 1k commits	3 ms 12.1 MB

Install footprint

Disk size after install. release-please appears here only — its runtime can't be benched offline (it needs the GitHub API to resolve the latest release), so footprint is the fair comparison we can publish.

Tool	npm install	Native binary
ferrflow	13.0 MB	8.0 MB
changesets	26.0 MB	—
commit-and-tag-version	20.0 MB	—
release-please	96.0 MB	—
semantic-release	69.0 MB	—
standard-version	21.0 MB	—

Why FerrFlow ships smaller numbers

Native binary. No Node.js boot, no npm install, no plugin discovery. A ferrflow check on a 50-package monorepo finishes before node --version would have warmed up.
libgit2 in-process. Tag enumeration and commit walking happen via libgit2 in the same process. Competitors shell out to git per call; process-spawn overhead dominates on dense histories.
Single tool, not a plugin tree. semantic-release pulls a chain of analyzers, notes generators, npm publishers and changelog writers — each with its own require() cost. FerrFlow's pipeline is one Rust crate.

Numbers updating every release. See the latest release notes for the full table including baseline delta.

How we measure

check

release --dry-run

tag

validate

version