Sessions

Web Server Shootout

This proposal has been accepted as a session.

*
Accepted Session
Chemistry
Short form
osb2009-0119
Scheduled: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 from 5:00 – 5:45pm in Hawthorne
Session notes

Excerpt

Deploying your .com behind nginx so you're ready to handle that flood of users on launch day? Wondering if you should use mod_python, mod_wsgi, or FastCGI to deploy your new Django project? This presentation will present comprehensive and practical benchmarks across a wide variety of metrics to help you make an informed decision.

Description

Apache is no longer the only sensible open source web server choice. Lighttpd and Nginx, as well as a number of other contenders, have become popular and blogs are littered with quick & dirty benchmarks proving which server is supreme. With a myriad of languages, platforms, and deployment options, there’s very little way to tell which combination is right for your specific needs.

This presentation will measure a number of environments on a wide variety of metrics:

Metrics

  • Requests per second (of course)
  • Memory usage
  • Features (extensibility, modularity, etc)
  • Community (support options, tools/modules available, etc)
  • Portability
  • Reliability (can I crash it? how well does it handle load?)
  • Administration (floods of patches? hideous configuration?)

Web Servers

  • Apache (prefork and worker mpms)
  • Nginx
  • Lighttpd
  • Possibly others such as Cherokee or even proprietary options like Google App Engine and IIS.

Benchmarking static files isn’t really useful to anyone, so I’ll test as many of the servers on as many of the following frameworks and applications as possible:

  • WordPress
  • Drupal
  • Bugzilla, Redmine, and Trac
  • trivial Django app
  • trivial Ruby on Rails app
  • trivial Zend Framework app

Please feel free to leave suggestions for other applications, frameworks, and environments that I should make sure to include!

For more details as I run the tests to make my presentation you may want to follow the osbridge tag on my blog.

Tags

benchmarks, statistics, web, http, apache, lighttpd, nginx, python, Ruby, php

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Speaker

  • Schmichael-2009

    Michael Schurter

    Lo-Fi Art, LLC

    Biography

    Michael Schurter is a Python web developer at Lo-Fi Art in Portland. He spends his days hacking Django, CherryPy, jQuery, non-relational databases, and a bunch of other fun technologies while trying to forget his past life working with PHP and ASP.NET in a small Midwestern startup. He’s an active member in the Portland Python User Group and has the requisite serious-computer-hacker beard.

    Sessions

    • * Web Server Shootout
      • Title: Web Server Shootout
      • Track: Chemistry
      • Room: Hawthorne
      • Time: 5:00 – 5:45pm
      • Excerpt:

        Deploying your .com behind nginx so you’re ready to handle that flood of users on launch day? Wondering if you should use mod_python, mod_wsgi, or FastCGI to deploy your new Django project? This presentation will present comprehensive and practical benchmarks across a wide variety of metrics to help you make an informed decision.

      • Speakers: Michael Schurter