Bifrost LLM Gateway: 11 Microsecond Overhead, Single Binary in Go

What Bifrost Is

Bifrost is a drop-in LLM proxy written in Go specifically for self-hosted environments. It routes requests to OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Bedrock, and other providers while handling failover, caching, and budget controls.

Performance Benchmarks

The developer benchmarked at 5,000 requests per second sustained:

• Bifrost (Go): ~11 microseconds overhead per request
• LiteLLM (Python): ~8 milliseconds overhead per request

That's roughly a 700x difference in overhead.

Memory Usage Comparison

At the same throughput:

• Bifrost: ~50MB RAM baseline, stays flat under load
• LiteLLM: ~300-400MB baseline, spikes to 800MB+ under heavy traffic

The developer notes that running LiteLLM at 2k+ RPS requires horizontal scaling and serious instance sizes, while Bifrost handles 5k RPS on a $20/month VPS.

Stability Under Load

Bifrost performance stays constant under load with the same latency at 100 RPS or 5,000 RPS. In contrast, LiteLLM gets unpredictable when traffic spikes - latency variance increases, memory spikes, and GC pauses hit at the worst times.

Unique Features

Bifrost includes an MCP gateway that connects 10+ MCP tool servers, handles discovery, namespacing, health checks, and tool filtering per request. LiteLLM doesn't do MCP.

Deployment and Migration

Deployment is a single binary with no Python virtualenvs, no dependency hell, and no Docker required. You copy it to the server and run it.

For migration, the API is OpenAI-compatible. You change the base URL and keep existing code, with most migrations taking under an hour.

Open Source Availability

The project is open source and available at github.com/maximhq/bifrost.