Apache has been the de facto standard web server for over a decade, but recent years have brought us web servers that consume less RAM and handle many more requests per second using fewer threads and asynchronous i/o. In my opinion, I also find the configuration of these servers to be more straightforward and minimal.
Why do people use Apache when asynchronous servers are so much more lightweight? Is there any clear benefit?
Ubiquity, "good enough", and familiarity.
Apache's .htaccess provides flexible configuration. This allows users on a shared host to customize certain settings of an apache without having to alter the core apache configs.
It is the standard server bundled in typical LAMP setups, although, many services use other web servers for in conjunction (like static files, video streaming, etc.).
Since Apache is popular, it's easy to find a solution to any problems.
Other than that, other solutions would probably be better.
Apache IS asynchronous if you want it to be with the Event MPM. Unlike Nginx and Cherokee, etc., it is not the default.
Apache's made some important moves in 2.4 so it can be more competitive — esp. as it pertains to serving static requests using the Event MPM. Various benchmarks don't speak well of this, but:
It's very difficult to ascertain how much slower Apache is in 2.4 because Apache's out of the 'box' configuration is detrimental to performance and legacy holds it back in some respects. For example, .htaccess requires stat/reading a multitude of files on every request, which may include many rules and regexes. Nginx doesn't have this problem, nor does Cherokee. Litespeed has .htaccess support in Apache's style, but only if you pay for it. Most benchmarks don't turn off features like those.
Most of the benchmarks are also ridiculous in that they're run locally and over a GbE network or similar. A real web server has to cope well with various speeds, including 3G phones. It could be that Apache's performance is better in the real world.
I doubt it.
Nginx is still faster, and I might choose it, but Apache isn't asleep.
Related
There are several discussions around the web about some "anonymous" benchmarks released by Litespeed Technologies on http2benchmark.org (etc) allegedly showing that their LS servers are faster than Nginx LEMP stacks (apparently, they knowingly disabled FastCGI caching):
https://hostedtalk.net/t/litespeed-servers-publishing-fake-benchmarks/4431
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/f06vse/litespeed_servers_seem_like_a_marketing_scam_are/
https://community.centminmod.com/threads/is-lsapi-litespeed-faster-than-php-fpm-nginx-etc-or-not.19153/
My question is three-fold:
As far as LSAPI on Litespeed vs PHP-FPM on Nginx is concerned, what would be a "fair" way to compare performance re: processing PHP queries since the environments are different?
Besides the PHP handler, is there any other part of the Litespeed stack that can be accurately benchmarked at the application-level (e.g. LS Cache) instead of the stack?
Have any unbiased third parties compared these two stacks in an accurate fashion?
I'd rather post this as a comment but it's pretty full already up there.
This benchmark routine by Ike Devolder is probably one of the most fair and detailed that I've come across in the past few years comparing Litespeed and Nginx:
https://blog.herecura.eu/blog/2020-06-16-openlitespeed-vs-apache-vs-nginx/
Some of the confusion is re: Litespeed vs. OpenLitespeed, but for this purpose it doesn't really matter since the biggest difference with Nginx is LSAPI, the PHP processor, rather than using PHP-FPM, and since OLS supports the same server-level caching that Litespeed does...
One of the best things about Ike's review is that he doesn't definitively say one is "better" or "faster" and instead talks about different components of either stack, while monitoring resources.
The TLDR for 2021 is probably something like this:
Both Nginx and Litespeed serve static assets extremely well
Litespeed as a stack scales higher than Nginx currently, partially due to HTTP/3 support... but 99% of websites probably will not notice this since we are talking about insane traffic levels, which almost never reach the origin server these days due to things like CDNs or remote MySQL servers, and since HTTP/3 is not fully integrated into the internet yet... in fact, even in Ike's own tests he seems to have tested both internally (not over i.e. UDP) which further reinforces this point since HTTP/3 is UDP-only. However, regardless of protocol, Litespeed does appear to scale to a higher level than Nginx... keep in mind, this is not the same as saying that LS delivers requests "faster" than Nginx, because real world requests at a typical traffic level are probably indistinguishable in terms of speed/response times. It does mean that i.e. a shared hosting environment with 500 cPanel websites would probably scale better using Litespeed... so it makes sense why that seems to be Litespeed's main target.
Litespeed appears to use more RAM memory than Nginx in general
Nginx appears to use a lot more CPU than Litespeed at high traffic levels
TCP (not Unix socks, the Litespeed default) performed a lot better, and this is true for Nginx as well, since it avoids disk I/O... so, using default Litespeed settings is still a bad idea
Anyway, best not to get too detailed, since software changes all the time really. The next version of Nginx will probably support HTTP/3, among other features. I do wish that the Litespeed guys would let the unique quality of their software speak for itself, and chill out on the aggressive (inaccurate) claims being made... but most of their web hosting partners probably benefit from that hype, which is maybe why not many people are questioning the claims being made...
I am choosing a better web server for big SPA application with dozens of JS and css files. With HTTP/2 we are now able to not merge them into two big files (3 MB for JS), that take pretty long time to load when on slow connection. But which server is better for the new HTTP/2 paradigm?
Nginx was designed to solve http/1 problems, and it's advantage was better serving numerous connections, with HTTP/2 there is only one connection for all the files, so the feature seems redundant now. What do you think, what can you advise me?
That's a very subjective question, and probably not a good fit for StackOverflow so imagine this will get closed. But here's my two cents...
Full disclosure: I primarily use Apache.
For a start let's address one of your incorrect points: Nginx wasn't designed to solve HTTP/1 problems. Nginx was designed to solve some of the scalability problems of previous web servers by being based on an asynchronous, event-driven model. Under HTTP/2 there should be less connections per client, which you could argue makes scalability less of an issue as each client uses only 1/6th of the resources they did previously - but that's probably a little simplistic. Apache has an event-driven MPM module for years now too (though often not turned on by default in case of any thread unsafe PHP applications - but this would also be a problem with Nginx!). This brings them more back in line, though there's still a lot of debate about this and many say Nginx is still faster. In my experience, unless you are dealing with truly huge volumes (in which case you should be looking at CDNs, load-balancers and cache accelerators), few will ever notice the difference between Nginx and Apache. This is especially true when downstream applications and systems come into play - a slow PHP application will quickly negate any performance or scalability issues at the web server level.
Anyway, back to your main question:
For HTTP/2 support, my choice would be Apache over Nginx. It has had better HTTP/2 support for some time. Nginx only added HTTP/2 Push support in early 2018 for example, whereas Apache has had that for a number of years now. Apache also supports a PushDiary (based on the now-abandon Cache-Digests proposal) to prevent pushing resources that have already been sent, supports 103 Early Hints for pushing early, and push prioritisation options. Moving on from HTTP/2 push, Apache also supports using HTTP/2 in proxy mode (though it's still marked as experimental and the usefulness of this is questionable at the moment), and HTTP/2 over HTTP (h2c - though again usefulness is questionable since browsers do not support this). I also find the main developer of the Apache HTTP/2 implementation very responsive on the GitHub page for the mod_http2 module (included as part of core Apache since 2.4.18 and no longer marked as "experimental" since 2.4.26).
On the flip side, I understand that Cloudflare uses a customised Nginx based web server, and they have HTTP/2 push for over a year now (it was them that backported this implementation to Nginx). So, given Cloudflare's scale, that speaks volumes to the implementation of that though not sure how customised it is from the core Nginx code.
There is also a HTTP/2 conformance Testing tool available and when I ran this against some common HTTP/2 servers (for a book I wrote on the subject btw) I got the following results which clearly shows Apache as the most compliant with the spec:
Now to be fair, most of the causes of errors are in not responding correctly to bad requests, that in a perfect world should never be sent anyway so aren’t that important. But still, we don’t live in a perfect world, and error checking is an important part of technology so I for one would certainly prefer the more compliant server. Similarly as pointed out in the comments below, the tool and web servers themselves, can be subject to race conditions and other problems which may incorrectly report errors.
Ultimately you are best choosing the implementation you are most comfortable with. The general feel has always been that Nginx is lighter and easier to configure, but on the flip side perhaps isn't as fully featured as Apache because of that. HTTP/2 support seems to continue that theme. If you want to play with upcoming HTTP/2 features then, to me, Apache definitely has the edge at the moment (though nothing to say that won't change in the future). However, for the basic use cases of HTTP/2, they probably can be considered similar. Even HTTP/2 Push is not used much yet, and there are serious concerns it could degrade performance if not used appropriately or due to implementation issues, which is probably why it has not been a priority for Nginx and while they only implemented it later.
I'm managing a hosting server and one of my customers will launch a high traffic PHP website. It's a penny auction website and we expect between 25k and 30k visitors per day.
Can you tell me please what should I change in my server configuration (PHP and Apache) to avoid problems? I'm afraid that the server crash with a large number of visitors.
Thank you
Using a lighter web server like nginx as a reverse proxy and a static content server should keep the Apache memory and CPU usage to a minimum which will be a problem on larger sites.
APC as an opcode cache will also be useful in a large site because compiling the PHP scripts to opcode is expensive.
Which Apache forking model are you using for the server? Event and Worker MPM's will probably work better for larger sites with higher concurrent connections.
How is PHP setup within Apache, i.e. FastCGI/CGI/DSO/SuPHP/FPM? SuPHP will be slowest while FastCGI, FPM and DSO will give you much better performance and allow you to use opcode caches.
If you don't need SSL support on the site a free service like https://www.cloudflare.com/ will also lessen the load on your servers.
You could put an opcode cache into use, eAccelerator is a good one for this purpose.
You may also want to consider creating Apache vHosts for static content like images/CSS/javascript to be served from. If these can be put into a CDN, then even better.
There are other tools available for benchmarking, including the Apache benchmarking tool "ab". You can use this to stress-test your site.
There are several areas in which tuning can take place, not just PHP.
I currently have one server with nginx that reverse_proxy to apache (same server) for processing php requests. I'm wondering if I drop apache so I'd run nginx/fastcgi to php if I'd see any sort of performance increases. I'm assuming I would since Apache's pretty bloated up, but at the same time I'm not sure how reliable fastcgi/php is especially in high traffic situations.
My sites gets around 200,000 unique visitors a month, with around 6,000,000 page crawls from the search engines monthly. This number is steadily increasing so I'm looking at perfomrance options.
My site is very optimized code wise and there isn't any caching (don't want that either), each page has a max of 2 sql queries without any joins on other tables, indexes are perfect as well.
In a year or so I'll be rewriting everything to use ClearSilver for the templates, and then probably use python or else c++ for extreme performance.
I suppose I'm more or less looking for any advice from anyone who is familiar with nginx/fastcgi and if willing to provide some benchmarks. My sites are one server with 1 quad core xeon, 8gb ram, 150gb velociraptor drive.
nginx will definitely work faster than Apache. I can't tell about fastcgi since I never used it with nginx but this solution seems to make more sense on several servers (one for static contents and one for fastcgi/PHP).
If you are really targeting performance -and even consider C/C++- then you should give a try to G-WAN, an all-in-one server which provides (very fast) C scripts.
Not only G-WAN has a ridiculously small memory footprint (120 KB) but it scales like nothing else. There's work ahead of you if you migrate from PHP, but you can start with the performance-critical tasks and migrate progressively.
We have made the jump and cannot consider to go back to Apache!
Here is a chart showing the respective performances of nginx, apache and g-wan:
g-wan.com/imgs/gwan-lighttpd-nginx-cherokee.png
apache does not seem to lead the pack (and that's a -Quad XEON # 3GHz).
Here is an independent benchmark for g-wan vs nginx, varnish and others http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx-vs-varnish-vs-gwan/
g-wan handles much more requests per second with much less CPU time.
NGINX is the best choice as a webserver now a days.
The main difference between Apache and NGINX lies in their design
architecture. Apache uses a process-driven approach and creates a
new thread for each request. Whereas NGINX uses an event-driven
architecture to handle multiple requests within one thread.
As far as Static content is concerned, Nginx overpasses Apache.
Both are great at processing Dynamic content.
Apache runs on all operating systems such as UNIX, Linux or BSD and
has full support for Microsoft Windows & NGINX also runs on several
modern Unix-like systems and has support for Windows, but its
performance on Windows is not as stable as that on UNIX platforms.
Apache allows additional configuration on a per-directory basis via
.htaccess files. Where Nginx doesn’t allow additional configuration.
Request Interpretation-Apache pass file System location. Nginx
Passes URI to interpret requests.
Apache have 60 official dynamically loadable modules that can be
turned On/Off.Nginx have 3rd Party core modules (not dynamically
loadable).NGINX provides all of the core features of a web server,
without sacrificing the lightweight and high-performance qualities
that have made it successful.
Apache Supports customization of web server through dynamic modules.
Nginx is not flexible enough to support dynamic modules and loading.
Apache makes sure that all the website that runs on its server are
safe from any harm and hackers. Apache offers configuration tips for
DDoS attack handling, as well as the mod_evasive module for
responding to HTTP DoS, DDoS, or brute force attacks.
When Choose Apache over NGINX?
When needs .htaccess files, you can override system-wide settings on
a per-directory basis.
In a shared hosting environment, Apache works better because of its
.htaccess configuration.
In case of functionality limitations – use Apache
When Choose NGINX over Apache?
Fast Static Content Processing
Great for High Traffic Websites
When Use Both of them -Together
User can use Nginx in front of Apache as a server proxy.
Which one of these two is most commonly used scenario? I want to use the same scenario in my learning process. thanks.
Don't know about the rest of the industry, but where I work we have Apache HTTPD front-ending for Tomcat.
Any static content is directly provided by HTTPD for performance. Pain in the neck to separate every app out, but there is a noticeable payoff.
Also, HTTPD has some nice code for cookie handling, URL rewriting, clustering and so on.
Only if we determine that there's dynamic, database-bound data to show do we forward to Tomcat, which does an admirable job there.
Has been working well for us for almost a decade. Others too, I would wager.