A comparison of several routing-engines – Which one is the fastest?

In the past blog post I wrote about the newest changes and encoding techniques that have been implemented in the Open Source Routing Project (OSRM). So I think it is time do a little comparison analysis about the request/response time of several routing APIs. The main question I wanted to answer was: “Is an OpenStreetMap direction service faster than G**gle?” I tested the following direction APIs for cars (fastest): MapQuest, CloudMade, G**gle and finally OSRM. For the analyses I wrote a small Java tool, which measured the time to get a result of a routing-service. I did all tests at home with a “regular” 12kbit/s internet connection. I tested several distance levels and the results can be seen in the following table. It shows the average times of five requests for each route with a delay of 3 seconds between each request/response. Overall I did this analysis three times.