Bad performance of nginx with Tomcat vs. Apache with Tomcat

István leccine at gmail.com
Thu Sep 3 11:26:21 MSD 2009


I think it would be beneficial to show us your nginx config :)

Regards,
Istvan

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 5:50 AM, Chang Song <changsong at me.com> wrote:

> Sometime ago, I posted an message about Nginx performance when paired with
> Tomcat.
> We recently did extensive in-house testing of various workload against
> Nginx with Tomcat vs Apache vs Tomcat.
>
> Apache wins hands down.
>
> Here's the basic setup
>
> 1. Nginx (2 proc/8192 connections) -> http/1.0 -> Tomcat (HTTP connector)
> 2. Apache (512 prefork) -> AJP -> Tomcat (AJP)
>
> Both KeepAlive off (we don't use KeepAlive due to L4 switch)
>
> The physical server is 2 core Intel Xeon, which is typical web server
> config here.
> We have three grinder 3.2 load generators.
> We tested 4K and 20K Tomcat simple HTML file, 20K simple HTML with
> intentional 10% 200ms
> sleep in Tomcat serving (emulate slow DB query), etc.
>
> Every single case, Apache wins by at least 10-15%.
> Throughput and response time.
> Nginx uses a bit less CPU cycles (10-20%), but it is not able drive Tomcat
> to 100% CPU.
>
> Here's my take on this performance problem.
>
> 1. Lack of AJP support, which is an optimized HTTP protocol
>   First of all, this is a serious bottleneck.
>
>   * AJP has much less communication overhead than HTTP
>
> 2. Lack of HTTP KeepAlive support for proxy
>
>   * Lack of AJP may be compensated with HTTP keepalive support since there
> are
>     at least twice the number of TIME_WAIT sockets (connection
> establishment mean time
>     is at least twice - three times slower than that of Apache)
>
> 3. Lack of connection pooling
>
>   * Ey-balancer makes things a bit easier, response times are stable, but
> still the same
>     average TPS and response time.
>
> 4. There seems to be a huge bug in connection management code
>
>   Two mix of transactions: 20K HTML serving and 8K HTML with intentional
> 200ms delay in Tomcat logic
>
>   With Apache, 20K HTML serving took  36 ms on average while 8K HTML took
> 258 ms
>   With Nginx,  20K HTML serving took 600 ms on average while 8K HTML took
> 817 ms
>
>   I really cannot explain these difference. Not even TCP connection
> overhead or lack of AJP.
>
> My questions is "should I abandon nginx at this point"?
> I know nginx is great proxy and static file server but I cannot prove my
> point with Tomcat over and over again.
>
> Thank you
>
> Chang
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
the sun shines for all
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