Re: Benchmarks

Miles Elam <miles@pcextremist.com> · Thu, 29 Apr 2004 12:35:58 -0700

Thanks for the reply!

Chris Davies wrote:

I'm not a fan of benchmarks

Yeah, I know.  Lies, damn lies, and statistics (benchmarks).  I like 

using them to find tendencies rather than absolutes.

Just after I emailed, I found this: 

http://www.litespeedtech.com/benchmark.html

I took it with a great big grain of salt considering it's a company 

trying to sell a competing product, but I couldn't see an immediate 

reason why their relative numbers between TUX and Apache would be 

conspicuously off.  Unfortunately, it's also with the 2.4 kernel, not 

2.6.  I certainly wish they had specified which MPM they were using for 

Apache2 though.

For 2.6 tux, there are some improvements, apache seems to pick up some
speed, probably through some of the 2.6 improvements.  I've not served
enough data with 2.6 to have any real impressions.

I would imagine TUX isn't hurt by the transition either.  Oh well.

I don't have enough large files (and I have tux set not to touch
anything >10mb anyhow) to really see what would happen over a long
download.

Why is this?  TUX streams the output doesn't it?  So why would file size 

make a difference?  I guess I could see for PHP perhaps, but why for 

static files?

Since you're using mpm-worker, I guess you don't need php since php4
requires apache2-prefork.  Even so, we haven't found
apache2-prefork/php4 to be a stable combination anyhow.

I am no big fan of PHP to be honest.  I've just used the worker MPM with 

php_cgi.  To be frank, if dynamic content performance were a premium for 

a project, I wouldn't use PHP.  Not saying it's for everyone, but for me 

the advantages to using Apache2 outweigh the drawbacks of using PHP in 

CGI mode.  Basically I just use it for the admin utilities so load 

hasn't been an issue.  If php_cgi gets more than 2 requests a second, I 

would consider it heavy usage.

For the most part, my dynamic servers are set up behind Apache in a 

multiple reverse proxy setup for better performance.  But reduced load 

for static is still reduced load;  Hence the questions about relative 

TUX performance.

Almost noone runs the same test on the same hardware with
different web servers.

Yup.  This makes relative comparisons few and far between.  (eg.  With 

4GB of RAM, FooMHz CPU, and a 8GB dataset, web server A gets X% less 

performance than server B.)

I have another machine that we are
experimenting with that has much larger images and less html.  Even with
that one, there is quite an improvement over apache.

Good to hear about.

For a true test, run mpm-worker, get it set up and running.  Then,
change the Port to 81 (or 8080 or whatever), stop apache, turn tux on,
restart apache and see.  It is very easy to turn tux on and off without
much interruption.

Yup.  I also like the fact that with TUX, I can toggle individual static 

file service by switching the "everyone" read rights.  In addition, 

there's something to be said for having TUX serve pre-compressed static 

files with gzip -9.

Thank you very much for the reply.  I really appreciate it.

- Miles Elam