From my cheap VPS in LA:
```
ab -n20 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&uselang=en&action=visualeditor&paction=parse&page=Barack_Obama'
Server Software: nginx/1.1.19
Server Hostname: en.wikipedia.org
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,2048,128
Document Path: /w/api.php?format=json&uselang=en&action=visualeditor&paction=parse&page=Barack_Obama
Document Length: 4095263 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 144.733 seconds
Complete requests: 20
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 81918086 bytes
HTML transferred: 81905260 bytes
Requests per second: 0.14 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 7236.634 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 7236.634 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 552.73 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 43 61 56.6 47 296
Processing: 2168 7176 7539.6 4625 34548
Waiting: 1960 4308 908.8 4367 5470
Total: 2211 7237 7572.9 4669 34642
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 4669
66% 5457
75% 5549
80% 6142
90% 20672
95% 34642
98% 34642
99% 34642
100% 34642 (longest request)
```
To rule out that this is caused by https, I repeated the experiment with http:
```
ab -n20 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&uselang=en&action=visualeditor&paction=parse&page=Barack_Obama'
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1604373 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking en.wikipedia.org (be patient).....done
Server Software: Apache
Server Hostname: en.wikipedia.org
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /w/api.php?format=json&uselang=en&action=visualeditor&paction=parse&page=Barack_Obama
Document Length: 4095263 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 181.187 seconds
Complete requests: 20
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 81917216 bytes
HTML transferred: 81905260 bytes
Requests per second: 0.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 9059.367 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 9059.367 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 441.52 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 12 115 309.1 14 1021
Processing: 2036 8944 4865.5 10475 16402
Waiting: 1879 3277 1041.4 4077 4464
Total: 2050 9059 5002.1 10492 17419
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 10492
66% 11933
75% 14249
80% 14588
90% 14840
95% 17419
98% 17419
99% 17419
100% 17419 (longest request)
```
This is on average more than four times slower than the equivalent content request directly to the parsoid caches, even after taking into account the slightly larger request body:
```
ab -n20 http://parsoid-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org/enwiki/Barack_Obama?oldid=643768869
Server Software:
Server Hostname: parsoid-lb.eqiad.wikimedia.org
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /enwiki/Barack_Obama?oldid=643768869
Document Length: 3592164 bytes
Concurrency Level: 1
Time taken for tests: 28.005 seconds
Complete requests: 20
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 71853606 bytes
HTML transferred: 71843280 bytes
Requests per second: 0.71 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1400.269 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1400.269 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 2505.57 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 69 70 1.4 69 73
Processing: 862 1330 319.4 1348 2092
Waiting: 88 233 321.8 95 1322
Total: 931 1400 319.6 1418 2161
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1418
66% 1528
75% 1552
80% 1628
90% 1867
95% 2161
98% 2161
99% 2161
100% 2161 (longest request)
```
All requests are Parsoid Varnish hits, as witnessed by `hit/200` entries in the logs on cp1045.