Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2009 about Web and HTTP on Wednesday 17th June

Apache is no longer the only sensible open source web server choice. Lighttpd and Nginx, as well as a number of other contenders, have become popular and blogs are littered with quick & dirty benchmarks _proving_ which server is supreme. With a myriad of languages, platforms, and deployment options, there's very little way to tell which combination is right for your specific needs.

This presentation will measure a number of environments on a wide variety of metrics:

*Metrics*

• Requests per second (of course)
• Memory usage
• Features (extensibility, modularity, etc)
• Community (support options, tools/modules available, etc)
• Portability
• Reliability (can I crash it? how well does it handle load?)
• Administration (floods of patches? hideous configuration?)

*Web Servers*

• Apache (prefork and worker mpms)
• Nginx
• Lighttpd
• Possibly others such as Cherokee or even proprietary options like Google App Engine and IIS.

Benchmarking static files isn't really useful to anyone, so I'll test as many of the servers on as many of the following frameworks and applications as possible:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Bugzilla, Redmine, and Trac
• trivial Django app
• trivial Ruby on Rails app
• trivial Zend Framework app

Please feel free to "leave suggestions for other applications, frameworks, and environments that I should make sure to include!":http://michael.susens-schurter.com/blog/2009/03/29/crowdsourcing-my-os-bridge-talk-proposal/

For more details as I run the tests to make my presentation you may want to follow the "osbridge tag on my blog.":http://michael.susens-schurter.com/blog/tag/osbridge/