HAProxy Technologies releases HAProxy 3.3 and community performance packages

HAProxy Technologies released HAProxy 3.3 and published precompiled HAProxy Community Performance Packages intended to reduce TLS-related bottlenecks while simplifying installation for the open source community.

The company described HAProxy as providing performance efficiency that represented cost advantages compared with traditional Application Delivery Controller (ADC) appliances and cloud-native load balancers, and it said the new packages extended that efficiency on large-scale multi-core systems.

Engineers at HAProxy Technologies compiled the new packages with the AWS-LC Transport Layer Security (TLS) library and worked with the AWS Cryptography team to optimize the AWS-LC build configuration and its integration with HAProxy. Internal benchmarks in the research paper “The State of SSL Stacks” showed HAProxy instances running with AWS-LC achieved over 180,000 end-to-end TLS connections per second on a 64-core Graviton4 instance and scaled linearly with additional Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores, representing about a 50% increase over the most commonly used alternative TLS library.

The release removed the need for users to manually compile HAProxy and to manage complex dependencies by providing install-ready packages via standard package managers; official packages were available for Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12, and Debian 13, and support for RHEL systems was listed as coming soon. HAProxy 3.3 also included features listed in the release such as Kernel TLS (kTLS), an experimental Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC) backend on the server, ACME DNS-01 support, and persistent statistics stored in shared memory.

“Our philosophy is simple: performance should never be compromised,” said Willy Tarreau, CTO and Lead Developer, HAProxy Technologies. “With recent changes in the TLS landscape, we saw architectural trade-offs that impacted the speed and efficiency that the HAProxy community relies on. By offering packages pre-compiled with AWS-LC, we are lowering the barrier to entry for high-performance load balancing with TLS, allowing every user to unlock the full potential of their infrastructure without needing to be an expert in compiling the source code.”

The HAProxy Community Performance Packages were available for download immediately, and the company listed RHEL support as coming soon.