response times and network io

[Joe Williams]

i am performing some httperf tests against apache and nginx. something i 
noticed that piqued my interest were the consistency of response times 
(0.4 ms each run regardless of number of request, much lower than apache 
in all cases) and network I/O (consistently higher than apache 
regardless of number of request). it also uses less cpu than apache and 
doesn't nearly drive up the load.

are these normal results? is there a mechanism in nginx that keeps the 
response times low and consistent? also, is it normal that it uses more 
network I/O? if so, what is the cause? to me it would seem like that it 
uses more bandwidth to respond to the same number of requests which 
seems inefficient.

please correct me if i am wrong. i am just trying to understand the core 
differences in how nginx works in comparison to apache and why i would 
see these performance differences.

thanks for the help.

-joe

-- 
Name: Joseph A. Williams
Email: joe at joetify.com