Web Server Shootout

A session at Open Source Bridge 2009

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/