Benchmarks

[Miles Elam]

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