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Damn lies and benchmark comparing Apache and Nginx
2nd of June 2008
Today I moved a bunch of sites over from Apache to Nginx but still keeping Squid in between as a http accelerator (I hope to replace Squid with Varnish soon). I did a quick benchmark of a HTML page that is cached by Squid, 4 times via Apache and 4 times via Nginx. The results:
Apache2 ******** Requests per second: 1601.34 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 6.268 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.627 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 13020.50 [Kbytes/sec] received Nginx ******** Requests per second: 1810.02 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 5.6435 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.5645 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 14591.35 [Kbytes/sec] received
That's "only" 13% faster and I had hoped for a bigger difference but the test is very simple and depends on how Squid feels. The other important test would be to see how much less CPU and memory Nginx uses during the stresstest period but that's for another day.
One note: This is Nginx 0.4.3 on Debian Etch. The current stable release is Nginx 0.6.13. I'll need to talk to my sys admins to remedy this. Perhaps it makes a difference on the benchmark, I don't know.
Comment
Igor Clark -
16th July 2008
[«« Reply to this]
Incidentally, forgot to mention http://code.google.com/p/ncache/ - a Squid replacement based on nginx.
Incidentally, forgot to mention http://code.google.com/p/ncache/ - a Squid replacement based on nginx.
Cliff Wells -
18th August 2008
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I'd also suggest that such a light test didn't really test either server. It's highly unlikely you'll be able to significantly load Nginx with only a single client making requests.
Also, you didn't publish any information on CPU/RAM utilization for each server under the same load. Even if you can't load the servers up enough to create a significant req/s difference you should definitely see a large difference in resource utilization at whatever load you are able to generate.
I'd also suggest that such a light test didn't really test either server. It's highly unlikely you'll be able to significantly load Nginx with only a single client making requests.
Also, you didn't publish any information on CPU/RAM utilization for each server under the same load. Even if you can't load the servers up enough to create a significant req/s difference you should definitely see a large difference in resource utilization at whatever load you are able to generate.
Hey Peter - long shot, because I don't know your setup or exactly what you're trying to do, but for static content, have you thought of trying it without squid?
We've been using nginx a lot and get pretty stellar results in comparison to Apache when it comes to straight html, particularly when the concurrency goes up. We served 440K ~1MB (!) PIs in about 5 hours with nginx on a dual-core Xeon with CentOS 5 with 2GB RAM and the thing didn't break into a sweat; use system sendfile, keep everything in kernel cache RAM and you're laughing. In another project, using a mix of static content and dynamic upstream (FastCGI), nginx served up 38.3 million static files and over 27 million upstream requests in 7 days, and I never once saw the load on the nginx box go above 0.5 - I've seen Apache boxes crying under much, much lighter load than that.
If you're testing both Apache and nginx against Squid, at worst squid might be the bottleneck, and also it seems maybe you're really testing the respective upstream modules, rather than the serving capacity. If you just want to chuck out flat HTML, do try nginx on its own if you haven't already. I'm just guessing, but intuitively I reckon introducing Squid into the equation might slow nginx down, particularly if it's all on the same box, because of squid's memory usage, and the extra pile of context switches.
Like I say, I don't know anything about your setup so I know I'm just guessing wildly about this, but my experience of nginx has been so overwhelmingly impressive that I'm loath to use Apache at all these days.
Anyway, hope all's well!