G-WAN Rules in Static Benchmark Test Battery

Over at his blog Spoot!, Nicolas Bonvin recently posted two summaries of the great work he's done benchmarking how well various open-source and free Web servers dish up static content under high loads. Bonvin, a PhD. student at the …cole polytechnique fÈdÈrale de Lausanne (EPFL in Switzerland, specializes in high-volume distributed data systems, and brings considerable expertise and real-world experience to bear in designing his tests.

First Round of Performance Testing

In his first post, Bonvin laid out the evidence he'd accumulated by running benchmark tests against six Web servers: Apache MPM-worker, Apache MPM-event, Nginx, Varnish, G-WAN, and Cherokee, all running on a 64-bit Ubuntu build. (All Web servers used, save for G-WAN, were 64-bit.) This first set of benchmarks was run without any server optimization; each server was deployed with its default settings. Bonvin measured minimum, maximum, and average requests per second (RPS) for each server. All tests were performed locally, eliminating network latency from the equation.

On this initial test battery, G-WAN was the clear winner on every conceivable benchmark, with Cherokee placing second, Nginx and Varnish close to tied, and both strains of Apache coming in dead last. As Bonvin notes, it wasn't even close. G-WAN, a small Web server built for high performance, completed 2.25 more requests per second than Cherokee (its closest competitor), and served a whopping 9 to 13.5 more requests per second than the two versions of Apache.