Server speed benchmarks

Yesterday, I wrote about node.js being fast. Here are some numbers. I ran Apache Benchmark on the simplest Hello World program possible, testing 10,000 requests with 100 concurrent connections (ab -n 10000 -c 100). These are on my Dell E5400, with lots of application running, so take them with a pinch of salt.

PHP5 on Apache 2.2.6 `<?php echo “Hello world” ?>`	1,550/sec	Base case. But this isn’t too bad
Tornado/Python See Tornadoweb example	1,900/sec	Over 20% faster
Static HTML on Apache 2.2.6 `Hello world`	2,250/sec	Another 20% faster
Static HTML on nginx 0.9.0 `Hello world`	2,400/sec	6% faster
node.js 0.4.1 See nodejs.org example	2,500/sec	Faster than a static file on nginx!

I was definitely NOT expecting this result… but it looks like serving a static file with node.js could be faster than nginx. This might explain why Markup.io is exposing node.js directly, without an nginx or varnish proxy.

Comments

Olivier 12 Dec 2011 3:39 am: Nginx has to read the file from the disk each time. Nodejs has the content of the file in memory. So it’s normal that nodejs is faster than Nginx. Re-test the same thing but setup Nginx so it caches files in RAM and you’ll see the truth.

Seamsky 4 Jun 2013 11:31 pm: Please, use “return 200 ‘Hello world’;” for nginx instead of serving file from hard drive.

Olivier 12 Dec 2011 3:39 am: Nginx has to read the file from the disk each time. Nodejs has the content of the file in memory. So it’s normal that nodejs is faster than Nginx. Re-test the same thing but setup Nginx so it caches files in RAM and you’ll see the truth.
Seamsky 4 Jun 2013 11:31 pm: Please, use “return 200 ‘Hello world’;” for nginx instead of serving file from hard drive.