In late Decem­ber I started look­ing at alter­na­tive web servers, hav­ing hit a point where I actu­ally asked aloud (though to no one in par­tic­u­lar) why I still use Apache for any http or php needs that may arise.

I sat down, installed nginx (nginx 0.6.33) from the EPEL (Extra Pack­ages for Enter­prise Linux) repos­i­to­ries and lighttpd (lighttpd 1.4.20) from the RPM­forge repos­i­to­ries (both third party repos­i­to­ries worth writ­ing about in detail at a later date). Apache was already installed (httpd 2.2.3), so a vir­tu­al­host was con­fig­ured to serve data from the same doc­root using all three servers, and PHP through fastcgi was con­fig­ured for lighttpd and nginx¹.

I then set up a stock Word­Press 2.7 blog, some large images, some thumb­nails, and cre­ated what amount to approx­i­mately a 20k index page with noth­ing cached. Using ApacheBench to fetch 1000 requests, 100 requests at a time, I came up with some sim­ple num­bers show­ing how long it took to return the same page for each web server.

While I openly admit that the bench­marks pro­duced here are arbi­trary and super­fi­cial, they do give some rough insight (10,000ft overview level insight) as to how much faster nginx and fastcgi are over apache 2.2 and mod_php. lighttpd also per­formed admirably, and with less has­sle involved in set up than nginx, but I sus­pect that may just be pre­vi­ous famil­iar­ity with the configuration.

A table of num­bers (soon to be a graph, when I feel like mak­ing it) and some thoughts as to what they mean and why we (the web host­ing com­mu­nity) still use Apache reli­giously fol­lows after the jump.

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