While reading articles over the weekend about Nginx, I found a few of the typical Nginx vs Apache benchmarks.
In every benchmark, someone always showed up to defend Apache's appalling performance, and claim that Apache has a ton of modules enabled by default in it's configuration file, which should be removed for a production system regardless.

That's a fine argument, and seems very likely true (but then it should be documented in the config file exactly which module is needed for what), but my question is, doesn't Nginx have a number of modules compiled in for extra functionality? At least, in a system binary on Ubuntu for instance?

I installed Nginx from Apt on Ubuntu, so that is a pre-compiled binary (I assume with all features enabled), whereas I compiled Nginx for Centos, without multiple modules, such as Server Side Includes.

So it seems to stand to reason that Nginx is typically being benchmarked with a variety of modules enabled by default as well. Granted, not as numerous as Apache, but still multiple modules, and is not running at it's own peak efficiency either in most benchmarks.


To be rid of the Nginx detractors, it would be nice to see a benchmark with Nginx & only X list of modules, and Apache with X list of modules, to produce roughly the same functionality (ability) between each installation, and then benchmark each.
I should think that would remove anyone's arguments :-)


Cheers