nginx vs litespeed hosting

Well, we have long been interested in how fast will Magento work on NginX server, finally we've got a chance to test this. One of the clients has moved his Magento-based store from Litespeed server onto NginX one.

How we tested it:

We used AB (Apache benchmark) utility. We have checked how many pages each web-server generated within one minute, with 15 concurrent connections to the server.

Servers configuration:

Old Server:
- Litespeed (version 4.0.12)
- Dual CPU Quadcore Intel Xeon;
- 6GB RAM,
- 4xHDD 15000 rpm RAID 1+0		 New server:
- NginX (version 0.7.65)
- Single CPU DualCore Intel Xeon;
- 2 GB RAM,
- 1xHDD 7200 rpm

Software Configuration:

There was identical copies of the same store on both servers, store is based on Magento version 1.4.0.1.

Results:

Litespeed
Benchmarking ***.com:
Finished 672 requests		 NginX
Benchmarking ***.com:
Finished 2761 requests

The results are really impressing. NginX performance is overhelming, even if the Litespeed server has much better hardware than NginX one.

No surprise why Varien moved Magento site and demo store to NginX.

P.S. our client is really happy, because now he can use cheaper server hardware without the speed affecting.

Detailed Results

Results for LiteSpeed:

Benchmarking ***.com (be patient)
Finished 672 requests
Server Software: LiteSpeed
Server Hostname: ***.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /magento/
Document Length: 23391 bytes
Concurrency Level: 15
Time taken for tests: 60.155 seconds
Complete requests: 672
Failed requests: 668
(Connect: 0, Length: 668, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 16052994 bytes
HTML transferred: 15770426 bytes
Requests per second: 11.20 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1339.289 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 89.286 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 261.27 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 66 68 12.9 67 255
Processing: 587 1251 412.8 1137 5233
Waiting: 439 1092 401.4 986 5079
Total: 825 1320 411.7 1204 5300
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1204
66% 1327
75% 1429
80% 1482
90% 1781
95% 2095
98% 2465
99% 2904
100% 5300 (longest request)

 Results for NginX (Engine-X):

Benchmarking  ***.com (be patient)
Finished 2761 requests
Server Software: nginx/0.7.65
Server Hostname: ***.com
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /magento/
Document Length: 24471 bytes
Concurrency Level: 15
Time taken for tests: 60.1140 seconds
Complete requests: 2761
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 68512771 bytes
HTML transferred: 67680271 bytes
Requests per second: 46.02 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 325.975 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 21.732 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1115.10 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 30 74 30.2 69 153
Processing: 183 250 30.4 255 347
Waiting: 30 75 9.7 77 91
Total: 225 324 10.1 324 378
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 324
66% 327
75% 335
80% 335
90% 335
95% 336
98% 338
99% 346
100% 378 (longest request)