Apache is dead. Long live Lighttpd!
I have been testing the performance of our apache webserver over the last couple of days. Using apachebench I managed to get approx. 80 php requests / sec fetching dyanmic and static pages from apache. The box was really struggling. The load on the machine was over 100 and apache maxed out with 250 processes!
I wasn’t very happy with those results, so I thought I would port our application across to using lighttpd. After a little bit of mucking around with the configuration, I managed to get our application working under lighttpd. The difference in performance was enormous.
The tests shows the following results – approx. 1100 requests / sec for 2K static page and 350 requests / second for a php page! I still wasn’t convinced so I tested a 15K static page and it delivered over 700 requests a second! The amazing thing is lighttpd only opened 5 processes and the load tipped out at 1.5! That’s pretty damn amazing!
To be fair, lighttpd is using fastcgi built in. Still, apache has become very bloated. I configured lighttpd “out of the box” and received a massive performance increase. I have been using apache for a long time and been really happy with the performance. Now I realise that there is a much better way!
Apache is DEAD! Long live the new King – Lighttpd!