NGINX vs LightTPD

There is a big amount of web servers each has its own benefits, advantages and purposes…

However, only few of them are using in the lion share of domains. The leader is Apache without any doubts. But there are ,at least, 2 servers after Apache, that are good enough to be mentioned: Nginx & Lighttpd .

Scope

 

Today one of the hottest questions in discussions about web servers is “Which one is better lighttpd or NGINX ?”. In this article we will try to help network administrators to decide whether to use Lighttpd or NGINX.

Purpose

 

This article is not an attempt to prove some server’s advantage but just an example of real comparison tests. The goal is to compare 2 web servers without making any performance tuning in configurations. All must work from the box. For tests we have two Amazon m1.medium instances with 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04 with standard apt-get ed  nginx/lighttpd, php5-fpm with mysql support and default configured joomla (2.5.6) with sample data which comes with joomla’s  install package.

This article is about comparison of NGINX and Lighttpd: two light and versatile web servers, both of which are designed to be very fast, light and easy configurable. We will leave Apache alone in this article, but will come up and talk about king later on one of another’s.

Lighthttpd, is small, single threaded, so its memory and cpu consumptions are smaller,it is easy to configure, it is fast for static html pages. It was designed to be massively scalable and solve the C10k problem.

Nginx is an event-based web server. As it is asynchronous server,it provides scalability. In a process-based server, each simultaneous connection requires a thread which incurs significant overhead. An asynchronous server,like nginx, is event-driven and handles requests in a single (or at least, very few) threads which allows nginx to be very fast.

Tools

For web server benchmarking we will use probably the best tool for that purposes:

Siege:  http://www.joedog.org/siege-home/.

For Nginx and Lighttpd health monitoring we will use monitis-m3 , another  tool, that  makes your life easy:

Load time monitoring – https://github.com/monitisexchange/Monitis-Linux-Scripts/tree/master/LoadTime

Web server monitoring –

https://github.com/monitisexchange/Monitis-Linux-Scripts/tree/master/Lighttpd-monitor

https://github.com/monitisexchange/Monitis-Linux-Scripts/tree/master/Nginx-monitor

And custom  bash monitor for process monitoring:

https://github.com/monitisexchange/Monitis-Linux-Scripts/tree/master/Process-monitor

We also used Dstat for fixing memory, CPU usage and and Load Average.

http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/

 

 

Preparations

Nothing was changed to increase performance of neither web servers nor php+mysql stack.

The only change was made is increased ulimit to 10.000 on both servers

Added appropriate records for Amazon instances   in host files

Assume AMI1  is an instance with nginx installed and AMI2  is an instance with lighttpd installed accordingly

Tests

 

First of all we need to clarify, how we did our tests (Server, Benchmark tool, method etc .. ) So the servers are EC2 Medium instances

We run siege benchmarking tool with adding concurrent sessions each 2 minutes. starting with 5 and ending up with 60 concurrent connections. As I told  before we have standard apt-get ed nginx and lighty with MySQL-5.1 and php-fpm installed. Below are logs from siege run and dstat outputs  during peak load .

Siege logs:

 

NGINX:

 

 

Lighttpd:

 

 

 

Ok. So what we can see here by looking on logs. As for me NGINX is definitive winner. After 45 concurrent connection Lighttpd was fully dead while NGINX was still somehow defending. 50 and more were critical for both so nothing to comment here. But even before that we can see that almost at every load NGINX behaves itself better that Lighttpd. You can see that all transfer rates throughput are better in NGINX rather than Lighttpd.

So I will leave you alone with this numbers and place more and much nicer Graphs below, which I grab from Monitis Dashboard. First graph shows http Load time and second: amount of resources used respectively by NGINX and Lighttpd.

 

NGINX uses same amount of resources while it is loaded or idle.

Now let’s summarize what we have got during test and what we know about these two servers.

In the table below we have  collected some data about both servers ,which will give us more clear picture of what these servers are and  which one is more preferable to use. We are not going to discuss special cases, when the Lighttpd or Nginx have some specific or even critically important features for specified project. These are just general descriptors which are interesting for most of users.

 

Load performance data:

 

 

 

 

LightHTTPD

Lighttpd	Weight(0-10)
asynchronous server	5
C	5
43	7
yes	10
via mod_cml	5
no	0
HTTP(S)	3
Single ascii file	5
Modular architecture http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/wiki/docs:configurationoptions	5
Strange unknown	0
as FastCGI	3
Light	10
Medium	7
chroot, set UID, set GID protecting docroot strict HTTP-header parsing	7
TLS/SSL/SNI	7
Users report about memory leaks	6
BSD	10
Forum, Bug tracking, IRC	5
0.6%
Not available	0
Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, CentOS,OpenSuse,Gentoo,FreeBSD	9
2003 – Current	10
Active	8
YES	10
1.4.31 (May 31,2012 )	9
	141

Conclusion

 

As your both servers have quite similar behavior, but seems that NGINX behaves itself better and has better community support. So if someone asks me which one to chose I will say “NGINX” as it is more popular and you will always have more info about NGINX with just Googleing your request. If you are corporate user and need commercial support NGINX will provide it at www.nginx.com, Lighthttpd will not (however we could not find any reference to commercial support of Lighthttpd). And in fact we see that NGINX is more actively developed and goes ahead much faster that Lighthttpd.  However the fact the giants Wikipedia and YouTube uses Lighthttpd make us believe that this server is well enough to be used for wide amount of website owners .