Quick comparison of Nginx and Apache

August 26th, 2011 · · CakePHP 4 comments - Tags: , , , , ,

This was a quick test as I was playing around with Nginx and CakePHP 2.0.

The numbers were interesting, however.
What I did:
- Setup a virtual box with Windows host
- OS: Ubuntu (Natty)
- PHP 5.3.8
- CakePHP 2.0-beta (freshly pulled)
- apache2 (2.2.17)
- nginx (1.0.5)

Nothing was tweaked or tuned. I’ve setup both servers to use virtual hosts and simply load the default CakePHP page (i.e. fresh install).
There is no app behind any of this, but we are touching pieces of the framework and some PHP logic.
(Comparison is about the web servers anyway)…

Anyway, start apache and run:

ab -kc 10 -t 30 http://localhost/

So we’ll use apache benchmark to beat the localhost a little (for 30 seconds) and get some numbers:

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Finished 839 requests


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.17
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        4481 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   30.009 seconds
Complete requests:      839
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    839
Total transferred:      4109432 bytes
HTML transferred:       3759559 bytes
Requests per second:    27.96 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       357.679 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       35.768 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          133.73 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.7      0       7
Processing:   203  355 121.7    352    2931
Waiting:      202  355 121.7    352    2931
Total:        203  355 122.0    352    2938

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    352
  66%    360
  75%    365
  80%    368
  90%    377
  95%    385
  98%    393
  99%    404
 100%   2938 (longest request)

Now, shutdown apache, start nginx and repeat the above test:

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Finished 4451 requests


Server Software:        nginx/1.0.5
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        4481 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   30.001 seconds
Complete requests:      4451
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    0
Total transferred:      21367368 bytes
HTML transferred:       19972014 bytes
Requests per second:    148.36 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       67.403 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       6.740 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          695.53 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.3      0       7
Processing:    18   67  11.6     67     204
Waiting:        5   40  22.1     42     198
Total:         18   67  11.6     67     204

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     67
  66%     71
  75%     73
  80%     75
  90%     80
  95%     85
  98%     93
  99%    102
 100%    204 (longest request)

OK, let’s see:
Total requests served: Apache – 839, Nginx – 4451
Requests per second: Apache – 27.96, Nginx – 148.36

The other numbers are quite unbelievable as well.

What’s the point of all this? Tutorial on CakePHP 2.0 + Nginx is coming soon here ;)