19--34x faster on one-off requests -- without connection pooling, zerodep is dramatically faster than httpx because it avoids httpx's heavy client initialization and middleware stack overhead.
~1.6x faster with connection pooling -- even when both libraries reuse connections, zerodep's lighter abstraction layer still provides a measurable advantage.
Streaming is 23--33x faster -- zerodep's minimal stream abstraction translates directly into throughput gains.
File upload is 19--22x faster -- zerodep's simple multipart encoder outperforms httpx's more featureful implementation.
SOCKS5 proxy is 6--15x faster -- zerodep's pure-stdlib SOCKS5 implementation avoids the socksio + httpcore proxy stack overhead that httpx requires.
Benchmarks use a local server -- all tests hit localhost, so the numbers reflect pure library overhead without network latency.
zerodep has zero pip dependencies -- it uses only http.client (sync) and asyncio streams (async) from the standard library.