Two Iceberg Clients, One Protocol: Where the Time Goes
This article provides a step by step comparison of the Rust and Python clients for Apache Iceberg REST catalogs. It times both clients on the same operations against the same tables, then breaks one request down to see where the time goes. https://github.com/xbill9/lakehouse-iceberg-2026 What is this project trying to Do? Two Apache clients talk to the same catalogs: iceberg-catalog-rest 0.10.1 ,…
This article examines the performance differences between the Rust and Python clients for Apache Iceberg REST catalogs. Two versions of each client, Rust client 0.10.1 and Python client pyiceberg 0.12.0, are compared against Apache Polaris, Google BigLake, and Microsoft OneLake. The benchmark focuses solely on performance, not correctness of results.
The study includes measuring both client startup time and individual request times, breaking down the latter to understand where the time is spent. The Rust client shows significant speed advantages in most operations, especially those involving larger datasets. However, the overhead of HTTP library usage in the Python client contributes to most of the performance gap, with 85-90% of the difference attributed to this factor.
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