Speed and performance

Benchmarking the requests per second.

For our performance tests, we used the browser and the Apache Benchmarking tool. The browser tests were quite simple, we right-clicked on our page, selected ‘Network’, refreshed the page and clicked the line which showed our URL. Once we clicked the line, we had access to the request and response headers. The headers enable us to see some performance stuff such as the server itself (that is, Nginx, Apache or Lighttpd), Keep-alive, gzip and cache control.

As far as the Apache HTTP Benchmarking tool goes, we used it to test retrieving an image 25,000 times, since this is a good way to gauge a rough of idea of the requests per second that each server was capable of.

To put each through their paces with set them running to fetch over 25,000 requests of a 200Kb JPEG file with 50 concurrent requests (users). The top two servers – both were within the eightsecond range – were Nginx and Lighttpd (aka Lighty). Coming in after this bracket, we see Openlightspeed appearing at around 14 seconds, Apache at 19 seconds and, finally, Tomcat just coming in at the rear at a touch over 20 seconds. Looking into the requests-per-second details, we see Nginx manages around 3,011 with Lighttpd just behind with 2,890. The rest cliump together somewhat further back with Openlitespeed at 1,776, Apache at 1,314 and Tomcat at 1,229. Although these times have quite a spread, the naked eye cannot tell which server is being used since the images and pages load quickly eough with all platforms. Thus, all tools are good for testing web applications on a local machine. When tests were made with an entire URL, like a default WordPress installation, results for speed variance amongst the servers were very similar for the image requests. VERDICT Apache 7/ 10 Tomcat 7/ 10 Nginx 10/10 Openlitespeed 8/ 10 Lighttpd 10/ 10 Nginx and Lighttpd are just plain faster out of the box.