Plugin Latency Tax Accumulation
warningEach Kong plugin adds cumulative latency (1-10ms per plugin), causing total request latency to balloon unexpectedly as plugins stack. Six plugins can add 15-20ms to every request, multiplying impact at scale.
Monitor Kong latency (time spent in gateway processing) and compare against upstream latency. If Kong latency exceeds 20ms with multiple plugins enabled, or if Kong latency increases proportionally with plugin count, plugin overhead is the bottleneck.
Audit active plugins and disable non-essential ones. Move expensive plugins (OAuth, Prometheus) to dedicated control planes. Use Kong-Debug header to identify which specific plugins contribute most latency. Consider replacing database-backed rate limiting with Redis-backed variant to save 3-4ms per request.