# Benchmarking Nginx on a prehistoric PIII 500 **URL:** \ **Category:** NGINX\ **Created:** [March 12, 2008, 10:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745 "2008-03-12T22:26:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2008, 10:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/1 "2008-03-12T22:26:51Z")
Hi list, After installing and configuring Nginx, I am now in the phase of making some benchmarking. My test server is a Pentium III 500 with 384MB of Sdram. Running Ubuntu 7.10 and Nginx 0.5.26 from package. I also installed Apache 2 for comparison. The test command is: httperf --server localhost --port 80 --uri / --num-conns 100 When requesting a static file (a simple hello world with the xhtml header), I get: Nginx: 750 req/s (deviation pretty even) Apache2: 760req/s (deviation: 600-800) When accessing Redmine’s index login page, I get: Nginx+thin (2 servers): 30req/s Mongrel (1 instance): 30req/s Do you think these are reasonable figures for my computer? I’d like to know if my current setup is “optimal”, well you know what I mean. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2008, 10:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/2 "2008-03-12T22:53:28Z")
Hi Igor, That’s pretty sick! 2000req/s is like 3 times as much as my result!!! What could possibly make so much difference between your setup and mine? The hardware? Config file? I do however have some other services running in the background: mail server, monitoring tools, etc. I’ll checkout more thoroughly the nginx documentation too. Thanks for giving these figures, ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2008, 11:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/3 "2008-03-12T23:02:16Z")
You are running the httperf command on the server… Have you tried it with another machine? Liang ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2008, 10:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/4 "2008-03-12T22:41:04Z")
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:16:14PM +0100, Thomas wrote: > Do you think these are reasonable figures for my computer? I’d like to > know if my current setup is “optimal”, well you know what I mean. Three years ago I used nginx on Pentium III 650MHz under FreeBSD 4.10 for static images. Real world load was 2000 req/s, 50Mbits/s, 31000 keep-alive connections. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 1:02pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/5 "2008-03-13T13:02:58Z")
Yeah that could be the problem, I just realized I was testing from my server. My other box is windows, so I’ll have to install cygwin to compile httperf, because I am not aware of any available binary for windows. It was too strange that 1 Mongrel would perform as well (or as bad) as 2 thin servers. Also the apache and nginx results are too close, there is no reason why I get the same result. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 1:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/6 "2008-03-13T13:10:21Z")
On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:48:57PM +0100, Thomas wrote: > Yeah that could be the problem, I just realized I was testing from my > server. My other box is windows, so I’ll have to install cygwin to > compile httperf, because I am not aware of any available binary for > windows. > > It was too strange that 1 Mongrel would perform as well (or as bad) as > 2 thin servers. Also the apache and nginx results are too close, there > is no reason why I get the same result. It seems that you benchmarked httperf itself. I do not think that cygwin httperf would be better: windows does not have high perfomance TCP/IP and cygwin emulation will make things more worse. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 1:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/7 "2008-03-13T13:55:33Z")
Hi guys, Here are results of the test I’ve made a couple of weeks ago: [http://blog.arh.cc/index.php?/archives/6-HTTP-server-comparison.html](http://blog.arh.cc/index.php?/archives/6-HTTP-server-comparison.html) Denis. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 2:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/8 "2008-03-13T14:40:44Z")
Thomas wrote: > Thanks Denis, your tests are really interesting. > > Does anybody know of a LiveCD that would have httperf on it? I am not aware of any live cd with httperf. However, you can compile a static binary and run it from your live CD environment. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 2:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/9 "2008-03-13T14:20:36Z")
Thanks Denis, your tests are really interesting. Does anybody know of a LiveCD that would have httperf on it? ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 3:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/10 "2008-03-13T15:39:15Z")
You can install it in a live cd, it should be no problem. But livecds are know to be slow, a bechmark should not be compromised in resources. – Aníbal ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 5:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/11 "2008-03-13T17:35:16Z")
@Denis, can you provide the configuration files and the “32B test file”, so I can run the same kind of tests on my setup? Because I see your hardware is really tough. I have been doing some quick tests with apache bench from my other windows windows, and it appears Nginx handles much better high level of concurrencies than apache. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 5:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/12 "2008-03-13T17:05:46Z")
Denis, Thanks for that 🙂 On the graph for disabled keepalive it’s very odd to see the initial _increase_ for Cherokee and Apache 1.3. Might that be due to the way child processes are configured? I.e., not enough to start, and not enough kept on idle? Anyway, those stand out as curious. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 7:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/13 "2008-03-13T19:26:51Z")
On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 11:02 -0700, Cliff W. wrote: > It’s also worth noting that with a 32 byte file you are mostly measuring > connection and http protocol overhead. You should probably serve a 1K > file at least. Also, you should provide more than a simple graph, specifically, how many failed requests (if any)? Average time per request and time for longest request (standard deviation). Apache bench provides all of these numbers. Most people would probably like to know the system load and memory/cpu utilization as well. You mention that config files will follow soon, so I won’t harp about the importance of those =) Regards, Cliff ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 8:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/14 "2008-03-13T20:30:51Z")
you might look at using siege as well. I never had good luck with httperf. I always used ab and siege, and compared the results. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 7:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/15 "2008-03-13T19:12:03Z")
You need more information about your test setup. 1. What type of machine(s) and software are you running the benchmark client from? 2. What type of network setup is involved? 3. Are you restarting the VMware instance between each run of tests? 4. How many runs of tests? Without this information, the tests aren’t very informative. It’s also worth noting that with a 32 byte file you are mostly measuring connection and http protocol overhead. You should probably serve a 1K file at least. Regards, Cliff ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 10:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/16 "2008-03-13T22:48:12Z")
Thanks a bunch Denis! I’ll dive into your files tomorrow. Personally what I would do is actually test against a “real webpage”, i.e: I will create a webpage with text, images, and css and hammer that page as much as I can. My first tests with nginx showed that I get the same performance serving my hello world page or a page that has the nginx logo (200kg jpg) on 10000 connections with 1000 concurrency, with cpu load of 50%. We should create a template page, and test against it. For instance we could use the nginx index page ([wiki.codemongers.com](http://wiki.codemongers.com)) as a reference, it has text and images. Also you may note that the design of your pages can greatly affect the performance: some webpages require 50 requests, and some leaner pages only take 15. I won’t even talk about pages loaded with js and flash… I’d like to know: if my cpu load is only 50% and the number of requests starts to drop: where is (are) my bottleneck(s)? Best regards, ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 13, 2008, 9:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/17 "2008-03-13T21:22:36Z")
I’ve filled some missing details about benchmarks and published configuration files and benchmarking script source: [http://blog.arh.cc/index.php?/archives/9-HTTP-server-comparison-2.html](http://blog.arh.cc/index.php?/archives/9-HTTP-server-comparison-2.html) @Cliff: I hope that post answers all of your questions @Thomas: I was wondering about those peeks too, maybe publishing configuration files will solve this questions. ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2008, 1:37am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/18 "2008-03-14T01:37:08Z")
On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 21:09 +0100, Denis Arh wrote: > I’ve filled some missing details about benchmarks and published > configuration files and benchmarking script source: > [http://blog.arh.cc/index.php?/archives/9-HTTP-server-comparison-2.html](http://blog.arh.cc/index.php?/archives/9-HTTP-server-comparison-2.html) > > @Cliff: I hope that post answers all of your questions It does. One thing I would immediately recommend is to _not_ run the client on the same box as the server. This pulls resources away from the server process and has a significant impact on both client and server performance. Basically what will happen is the two processes will reach an equilibrium point where neither can reach maximum throughput, only a balance (the faster the client goes, the slower the server goes and vice versa). Regards, Cliff ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2008, 4:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/19 "2008-03-14T04:44:49Z")
On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 19:54 -0500, Denis S. Filimonov wrote: > I’m surprised noone has asked the most obvious question yet: Why vmware? > It’s a huge unknown factor in the measurement which renders the whole > experiment questionable at best. I think this is actually a good benchmark specifically because it’s in VMware (although I think Xen or OpenVZ would have been more appropriate). It’s not a pure HTTP server test, rather a test of how the various servers operate in the constrained environment of a VPS. With the massive increase in VPS hosting and the fact that lots of people utilizing VPS hosting would benefit from a lightweight HTTP server makes this particular benchmark quite useful. Regards, Cliff ---
**Author:** ![thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/e36b37/32.png) [@thomas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/thomas)\ **Post date:** [March 14, 2008, 2:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745/20 "2008-03-14T02:02:55Z")
I’m surprised noone has asked the most obvious question yet: Why vmware? It’s a huge unknown factor in the measurement which renders the whole experiment questionable at best. [Next page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/benchmarking-nginx-on-a-prehistoric-piii-500/131745.md?page=2)