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Nginx vs Litespeed vs Apache vs Cherokee vs Lighttpd vs IIS
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Nginx vs Litespeed vs Apache vs Cherokee vs Lighttpd vs IIS

GIANT_CRABGIANT_CRAB Member
edited December 2012 in General

Nginx is good at loading static pages.
Litespeed is good at loading dynamic pages.
Apache has the largest community.
Cherokee is best at loading static and dynamic pages, however, its project has been abandoned. quite outdated. - https://github.com/cherokee/webserver/

Which is the best and why?
Begin war/argument/discussion.


Scores so far

Cherokee: 2
Nginx: 11
Apache: 2
Litespeed: 1
Lighttpd: 3
Microsoft IIS: 1

«13

Comments

  • A-Patch-ee?

  • @bamn said: A-Patch-ee?

    Helicopter.

  • @GIANT_CRAB said: Helicopter.

    I thought they were a group of mighty warriors killed off by the common cold

  • I love Cherokee. Unsure what happened with development. It was mainly one fellow, Alvaro behind it and he went the employee route elsewhere and that seems to have absorbed all his time. Hoping Cherokee gets back on track. Their admin control is slick. Wish Nginx had something similar for an admin.

    Nginx is becoming my new go to. But I often use it stacked on top of Cherokee :) Nginx is the Swiss Army knife for all sorts of things. A tad of a pain getting up to speed with config options though.

    Apache, blech! Unsure why it is still being pushed by folks. It's a mess to deal with. Never liked how it gets configed.

    Litespeed? Still under development?

  • GIANT_CRABGIANT_CRAB Member
    edited December 2012

    @bamn said: I thought they were a group of mighty warriors killed off by the common cold

    Not really, http://people.apache.org/

    @pubcrawler said: Litespeed? Still under development?

    Not really, http://www.litespeedtech.com/overview.html

  • <web-server-wars>nginx uber alles</web-server-wars>

    nginx is great; Apache only when needed for awful software that for some reason you can't get to work properly with nginx.

    Litespeed scares me with its TOS regulation against using it for pornographic sites. It's not like I ever plan to host smut but still.

  • AmitzAmitz Member
    edited December 2012

    I can only contribute my experiences with some of them. I am (as a hobby) responsible for the technical aspects of a busy non-profit adult gallery (Yeah, throw stones) and the content is half static, half dynamic. The site sees around 2-3 million hits a day and is quite "special interest"-like. Average image size is 500KB, requests are done dynamically via PHP.

    Apache / PHP:
    Tried it with every possible configuration. Was seeking help of several well-known managed providers. In the end, the site needed a fat quad-core dedicated server to cope with the load. I am quite sure that Apache would have been able to handle the thing right. I just did not found out how. ;)

    Apache / PHP / Varnish:
    The server had around 2 GB unused memory, so I tried to add Varnish. That decreased the load by 50%. Great thing, in general. But it caused some problems due to the caching and Varnish can be a pain to configure. In the end, it was more hassle than everything else. I decided to give up, even though the results were good.

    Litespeed:
    Switched to Litespeed hoping to be able to bring down the load and to downgrade to a cheaper server (non-profit project, as said). Indeed, Litespeed handled the load way better than Apache (decrease of around 15-20%). But: It costs money AND adult content is not allowed by LiteSpeed's TOS. So that wasn't an alternative. And to be honest: Compared with the combination below, LiteSpeed is not worth the money IMHO. It is, on the other hand, VERY EASY to configure and Apache compatible in many fields.

    Nginx / PHP-FPM / APC:
    Switched to Nginx in combination with PHP-FPM and APC. That was the bomb. What shall I say - The site has more visitors than ever and the server load has dropped by at least 50-70%. The website now runs flawless on a VPS with 512 MB RAM. Costs dropped by 90%. Wonderful. I would recommend that combination to everyone running an image gallery. However, configuring Nginx sometimes reminds me of the pain I felt with Varnish.

  • @Amitz, thanks for the great review for Apache, Ngnix and Litespeed.

  • eva2000eva2000 Veteran
    edited December 2012

    heavy PHP intensive sites and/or heavy mod_rewrite/htaccess support needed
    => Litespeed > Nginx/php-fpm

    everything else (particularly static file serving)
    => Nginx

    • although Litespeed static file serving easily matches Nginx just Nginx is free
    • when i mean heavy PHP intensive sites = 2,000 to 13,000 php requests/second

    My thoughts on Litespeed (Litespeed Cache), Apache + Varnish Cache and Nginx at vbtechsupport.com/33/ and webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=7577198&postcount=10.

    very old static file benchmarks for apache vs nginx vs litespeed

    i.imgur.com/XymWU.png

  • heavy PHP intensive sites and/or heavy mod_rewrite/htaccess support needed
    => apache +Varnish + apc + php-fpm
    else
    => Nginx + apc + php-fpm

  • @eva2000: Interesting read about Litespeed! Thank you!

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    I never needed anything else than apache, all my sites can run in 128 mb with apache :)

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    /me searches for Lighttpd in the list and can't find it...

  • As @joepie91 says, nobody loves lighttpd?

  • Apache was the very first web server I used and I stuck with Apache for quite some time. It worked with pretty much every script I tried to install without any issues. Over time I got tired of configuring all of the modules and everything and tried out Nginx a few years ago.

    Since then I have been running Nginx wherever possible. It seems to use less memory, be easier to configure, and is typically faster. The only problem is that sometimes it can be less compatible with certain scripts so I always have to have at least one Apache server on one of my VPSs to handle those scrips. I have used Lighttpd in the past and it's great for something that just installs and doesn't eat up a lot of memory, but configuring Nginx to use that same very little amount of memory isn't very difficult so I usually just go with Nginx.

  • IshaqIshaq Member
    edited December 2012

    Nginx or Lighttpd. But I use Apache too D:

    But vote for nginx.

  • @eva2000 said: very old static file benchmarks for apache vs nginx vs litespeed

    i.imgur.com/XymWU.png

    Hoyl sheet, Litespeed has amazing performances but Cherokee could outdo that.

  • @GIANT_CRAB said: Lighthttpd: 1

    It's Lighttpd

  • SpeedBusSpeedBus Member, Host Rep

    Cherokee all the way, really easy to setup and well the webUI is pretty nice, they recently moved their tracker to GitHub according to their mailing list, and updates continue there, https://github.com/cherokee/webserver

    Performance is much better than Apache and LiteSpeed, It might be equal or better when compared to lighttpd but I doubt it's better than Nginx.

    +1 to Cherokee from me !

  • @SpeedBus said: Performance is much better than Apache and LiteSpeed, It might be equal or better when compared to lighttpd but I doubt it's better than Nginx.

    +1 to Cherokee from me !

    Cherokee master race.

  • fanfan Veteran

    What about Apache 2.4? It's said to bring better performance over past versions.

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited December 2012

    I use Lighttpd everywhere, not sure why would anyone prefer anything else. :)

    I tried to use Nginx briefly, but felt too awkward to set-up and configure, compared to Lighttpd. And it does not provide any benefit to justify the switch. (No, it's not faster than Lighttpd, of if it is, then not by much and I don't care).

    Regarding Cherokee, I concluded that the author is insane when at some version he switched to a hideous format configs and said that from now on the primary method to set up the web server would be via the web UI, and editing configs directly is discouraged. Also since it is developed by one person and has a small user base, I can only imagine what kind of horrible security holes it might have.

    Apache is just way too huge and complex for pretty much any task, at least among those that you might want to do on a LEB.

  • @GIANT_CRAB said: Ngnix: 5

    Nginx, and thread is a typo too.

  • @rm_ said: I use Lighttpd everywhere, not sure why would anyone prefer anything else. :)

    How to do something like fastcgi_cache in nginx to lighttpd?

  • Im using lighttpd after apache on my control panel. It was much better and faster than apache and was easier to setup than nginx.

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited December 2012

    @jcaleb said: How to do something like fastcgi_cache in nginx to lighttpd?

    I tried to use Nginx briefly, and you expect me to know what "fastcgi_cache" is, or what it does? Well from the name I assume it caches fastcgi; there is ModCache in Lighttpd, there is also modules like XCache and APC in PHP.

  • RophRoph Member
    edited December 2012

    I use Nginx/PHP-FPM on all of my LEBs.

    For my "big" server, Nginx serves as a static request serving reverse proxy to Apache/mod_PHP/Xcache.

  • I just love nginx. When I started out setting up my first forum I did it with the software already running, which was Apache. It was slow and hard to configure in my experience. Then I searched a bit around and found nginx, the installation and configuration was easy and everything sped up amazingly. It might just have been that Apache wasn't configured right for my server at the time or perhaps I had too little knowledge, but that was when I got to nginx. For now I don't want anything else again.

    Their support IRC channel is also great. Every time the people there helped me out almost instantly with every problem I had.

  • eva2000eva2000 Veteran
    edited December 2012

    @GIANT_CRAB said: Hoyl sheet, Litespeed has amazing performances but Cherokee could outdo that.

    hmmm, never used Cherokee so probably something to try

    all i know is Litespeed can easily handle 10-12 million unique ip visitors per month (~75 million pageviews/month) for vbulletin forum on a single Intel Nehalem based quad core (8 cpu threads) server web server (with dedicated db server).

    From my own experience for php heavy dynamic sites, 1x Litespeed web server (without Litespeed cache) can replace:

    • 6x apache web servers load balanced OR
    • 4x nginx/php-fpm web servers load balanced (php-fpm bottleneck - most php-fpm folks scale out adding more php-fpm nodes to handle the extra php load or use fastcgi_cache (Litespeed has equivalent Litespeed cache for php too) for php but with very low TTL cache values to keep from serving stale data)

    when i mean heavy PHP intensive sites = 2,000 to 13,000 php requests/second (APC Cache already implemented)

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