Benchmark: LLM Gateway Delivers First AI Token ~35% Faster Than OpenRouter
A controlled benchmark conducted on July 22, 2026, tested time-to-first-token (TTFT) latency across LLM Gateway and OpenRouter using Claude Haiku 4.5 with 75 cold and 75 warm runs each from a single machine. LLM Gateway recorded median cold and warm TTFTs of 906ms and 814ms respectively, compared to OpenRouter's 1392ms and 1232ms — roughly 34–35% slower. The open-source benchmarking tool used raw Python sockets to separately measure DNS, TCP, TLS, TTFB, and TTFT phases, helping isolate actual routing overhead from connection costs. Notably, OpenRouter's edge servers completed TLS handshakes faster (13ms vs 40ms), but lost significant ground after the request was dispatched, with its TTFB nearly matching its TTFT on every run. All 450 HTTP requests across both gateways returned HTTP 200 with zero errors, and the full per-run dataset has been published.
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