Performance and benchmarks

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Measured on Node v18.18.0, Apple Silicon (ARM64). Reproduce with npm run benchmark in the repository.

Scenario	100 rules	1,000 rules	10,000 rules
evaluate (no cache)	4.3 µs / 231k ops/s	42.6 µs / 23k ops/s	1,091 µs / 917 ops/s
evaluate (cache hit)	0.6 µs / 1.66M ops/s	1.8 µs / 553k ops/s	29.1 µs / 34k ops/s
evaluate (all conditional)	3.4 µs / 292k ops/s	40.2 µs / 25k ops/s	1,064 µs / 940 ops/s
permitted (18 actions)	60.2 µs / 17k ops/s	718 µs / 1.4k ops/s	18,924 µs / 53 ops/s
explain (full trace)	22.4 µs / 45k ops/s	564 µs / 1.8k ops/s	6,444 µs / 155 ops/s

Most SaaS apps hold 10–50 rules. At 100 rules, a single evaluate is ~4 µs on one core.

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Practical guidance

• Enable cacheSize for hot, unconditional paths.
• Keep rule count reasonable; split engines per domain if you reach thousands.
• Prefer evaluate over permitted with huge action lists on hot paths.
• Use explain in tests and debugging, not per-request in production hot paths.

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Related

• Evaluation cache
• How evaluation works
• UI permissions — permitted() cost
• AccessEngine reference