Benching Lighttpd vs Nginx (static files)
February 14, 2007
As it stands, the Django development team recommends mod_python to deploy your Django applications. With that in mind, they recommend using a more efficient web server for static files. These days, most people turn to web servers like Lighttpd or Nginx for this task.
Installation
I installed both on a fresh 1GB Slice with similar configurations and benchmarked them using ApacheBench. I used the latest "stable" source releases from their websites: Lighttpd 1.4.13 and Nginx 0.5.12.
In both cases I just ran the following as root:
./configure make make install
Both installations went off without a hitch. To start Lighttpd I ran:
lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
And for Nginx:
/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx
Configuration files:
Two files were used for testing purposes:
Each file was accessed 100,000 times. For index.html concurrency was set to 1000, and 10 for test.png. Keepalive was not used.
Results
index.html:
| Nginx | Lighttpd | |
|---|---|---|
| Concurrency Level: | 1000 | 1000 |
| Time taken for tests (seconds): | 12.445774 | 10.951389 |
| Complete requests: | 100000 | 100000 |
| Failed requests: | 0 | 0 |
| Write errors: | 0 | 0 |
| Total transferred (bytes): | 56779947 | 62353634 |
| HTML transferred (bytes): | 35650196 | 35687932 |
| Requests per second [#/sec] (mean): | 8034.86 | 9131.26 |
| Time per request [ms] (mean) : | 124.458 | 109.514 |
| Time per request [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests): | 0.124 | 0.110 |
| Transfer rate [Kbytes/sec] received : | 4455.25 | 5560.21 |
test.png
| Nginx | Lighttpd | |
|---|---|---|
| Concurrency Level: | 10 | 10 |
| Time taken for tests (seconds): | 52.889986 | 54.976213 |
| Complete requests: | 100000 | 100000 |
| Failed requests: | 0 | 0 |
| Write errors: | 0 | 0 |
| Total transferred (bytes): | 32067859584 | 32070273152 |
| HTML transferred (bytes): | 32046457872 | 32045670938 |
| Requests per second [#/sec] (mean): | 1890.72 | 1818.97 |
| Time per request [ms] (mean) : | 5.289 | 5.498 |
| Time per request [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests): | 0.529 | 0.550 |
| Transfer rate [Kbytes/sec] received : | 592102.06 | 569675.94 |
Conclusion
Both servers performed extremely well, though it seems that Lighttpd might perform best in a more fragmented file system (smaller files). Nginx performed better serving test.png, but the difference is smaller than the preceeding test.
Considering that each would easily saturate the pipeline I doubt a real-world performance difference would be seen.
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Comments
I think the tux web server is the best!
Posted by tony
onfly gzip compression for html files was enabled on nginx?
Posted by ilya
Take a look at the bottom of the Lighty config file; Compression was enabled there too.
However, neither server actually did any compression. I would have had to tell ApacheBench to give the appropriate Accept-Encoding header.
Posted by SuperJared
Only 1 worker process for Nginx? Try bumping that up.
Posted by Wayne
Now what about CPU load and consumed memory?These are interesting things to compare under such "almost equal" load.
Posted by lamer
Yes, Tux would be faster but unfortunately it seems to crash on Linux 2.6 kernels, both SMP and non-SMP. Happens to me, and to various people on the Tux list. Actually I have not seen anybody run Tux stable on a new kernel, i.e. with Centos 4.3 upwards. I DID run Tux on Redhat 9 and it was both stable and very, very fast with close to zero Ram usage and zero server load. It's a wonderful static server but it seems the developer has to do it on the side and there is no real interest from Redhat to get it fixed in a more timely manner. Once a 2.8 etc kernel is out, it will probably run stable on 2.6 I guess.
So the remaining options are to use Tux on a 2.4 Linux kernel, or to switch to nginx/lighttpd/litespeed. I am going the nginx route I guess because some people reported memory leaks in lighttpd and litespeed's free version is limited to 150 concurrent users.
Posted by Lmm
i agree with lamer, cpu and memory usage are very important.
in my simple stress tests cpu usage showed lighttpd at 98% while nginx was never more than 52%.
Posted by grigora
I was testing same things, on my local box though (all requests made from localhost) both with static files, with a simple php file containing only phpinfo(); and with a sample wordpress installation.
Php running as fastcgi (by spawn-fcgi)
Nginx performed almost the same as lighttpd but cpu load was much better with nginx. (LA never got more than 5 while lighttpd bumped it up to ~10, and apache to 20+ while testing with the wordpress setup)
Btw, can't even compare it to apache, which almost crashed my box when testing the sample wordpress install.( 10000 requests, 1000 concurrent)
http://nixfloyd.blogspot.com/
Posted by floyd
Would the benchmarks be different if the image file was a JPG or GIF and be between 60-400kb in filesize?
Posted by James Warren
The difference of filetype would not change anything. And test.png is 313k.
Posted by SuperJared
You know what's strange, every time you run the benchmark it returns a different result. So how can you really get an accurate result?
Posted by Carlos
Perform the benchmark several times to get an average. If the ranges vary wildly then something's wrong. Plus this isn't an exact science anyway.
Posted by SuperJared
Hey, I stumbled across this page from google and and wanted to add something to these results. I recently wrote a simple C application to act as a HTTP server and to have some continuity, I re-run my tests with your index.html.
Take a look:
http://www.zenebo.com/word/asynchrono...
Posted by Arek
How many kbit of "test.png"?
Posted by 01478.com