Benchmarking Nginx on a prehistoric PIII 500

[Cliff Wells]

On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 05:59 +0100, Denis Arh wrote:
> I really think the environment itself is not the issue. It was testet
> on VMWare because it was easier to set-up at the moment. All testing
> servers had the same conditions, and adding the benchmarking tool to
> the whole mess did only create more realistic conditions (there is
> usually a few other services running on the VPS)
   
I feel I need to make this clearer: your environment is *not* the same
for each server.  If Nginx is serving pages faster than Apache, then the
client will in turn run faster to keep up.  If the client runs faster,
then it will consume more CPU, leaving less for the server to run on.
This means that Nginx would get less CPU time than Apache.  Does that
help clarify why this isn't a fair test?

I'd also point out that CPU isn't the only resource adversely affected
here.  There's also tons of work that the *host* OS (not just the VPS)
must do to run both processes (context-switching, memory allocation,
I/O, network stack, etc).  These are affected in much the same way as
the CPU (client consumes more, less is available for the VPS and HTTP
server). 

Regards,
Cliff