Hi,

I've just setup 2x identical Rackspace Cloud instances and am doing some comparisons and benchmarks to compare Apache and Nginx.

I'm testing with a 3.4k png file and initially 512MB server instances but have now moved to 1024MB server instances.

I'm very surprised to see that whatever I try, Apache seems to consistently outperform Nginx....what am I doing wrong?
[code]
Server Software: nginx/0.8.54
Server Port: 80

Document Length: 3400 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 2.320 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 3612000 bytes
HTML transferred: 3400000 bytes
Requests per second: 431.01 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 232.014 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 2.320 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1520.31 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 11 15.7 3 120
Processing: 1 35 76.9 20 1674
Waiting: 1 31 73.0 19 1674
Total: 1 46 79.1 21 1693

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 21
66% 39
75% 40
80% 40
90% 98
95% 136
98% 269
99% 334
100% 1693 (longest request)
[/code]

[code]
Server Software: Apache/2.2.16
Server Port: 80

Document Length: 3400 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 1.346 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 3647000 bytes
HTML transferred: 3400000 bytes
Requests per second: 742.90 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 134.608 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.346 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 2645.85 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 1 3.7 0 27
Processing: 0 3 6.2 1 29
Waiting: 0 2 5.0 1 29
Total: 1 4 7.0 1 29

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1
66% 1
75% 1
80% 1
90% 17
95% 19
98% 26
99% 27
100% 29 (longest request)
[/code]

I'm currently using worker_processes 4; and worker_connections 1024; but i've tried and benchmarked different values and see the same behaviour on all - I just can't get it to perform as well as Apache and from what i've read previously, i'm shocked about this!

Can anyone give any advice?

Thanks,

Ian