[patio11]

A couple of years ago, I would have said "That's wonderful advice because Nginx excels at serving static files and Apache is needed for the dynamic requests", but today only one of these is still true. The technique will certainly still work, though.

If I ever get a few hours to install Nginx and write config files for a few dozen PHP sites (blarg), I'm going to get rid of Apache altogether.

[jeb]

Why is it so hard to break nginx vs apache? What's the core difference?

[bradleyland]

Core difference: the request processing model. Nginx uses the "hot new" event-loop model. It's a good model, but I find that most people overstate the performance difference and resource usage.

The bigger problem is that Apache comes configured "out of the box" on most distros with a whole slew of options that you probably don't need. Even having said that, most people think that Apache is using more resources than it is. They see all these processes floating around in `top` and they freak out. See my post in the other thread (linked in parent) for more info on that.

Most of the concern is driven by ignorance rather than deep understanding. I can feel the searing burn of Nginx fans' glare, so let me qualify that. YES, Nginx is a fantastic web server. YES, pound-for-pound, it is more resource efficient than Apache. The catch is, if you trim Apache down to do only what you need, the margin between it and Nginx becomes much smaller. If you really know Apache well, then you don't necessarily need to switch to Nginx, just because it's hot and new.

If you don't know Apache well enough to scale it, or if you're really, really tight on resources (you can't afford a 10% bump in VPS RAM), then you should probably learn Nginx straight away, because it's a fantastic web server. Hell, every Apache admin ought to learn Nginx, because you will no doubt learn something in the process.

[andrewvc]

The catch is, if you trim Apache down to do only what you need, the margin between it and Nginx becomes much smaller.

While this may possibly be true (and I'm not sure it is for high levels of concurrency), there's a reason why I don't build my own kernels from source anymore, don't run gentoo anymore, and use nginx everywhere I can. It saves valuable time.

[bradleyland]

On Debian distros, trimming Apache down amounts to removing everything in mods-enabled and putting back in only what you need. Not exactly rocket science.

Again, I'm not advocating against Nginx. I'm defending the (apparently) commonly held view that Apache is some kind of resource monster that doesn't hold up under load.

[sirn]

> The catch is, if you trim Apache down to do only what you need, the margin between it and Nginx becomes much smaller. If you really know Apache well, then you don't necessarily need to switch to Nginx, just because it's hot and new.

Care to elaborate? I used to do that few years ago for static serving, from tuning Min/MaxSpareServers, measuring resource usage and speed of worker/prefork MPMs to strip out all modules to bare minimum and I still can't get the margin between Nginx and Apache to be any close.

[Daniel_Newby]

How are you measuring resource consumption? Memory consumption often includes a lot of shared virtual memory, where multiple Apache threads/processes simultaneously use the same physical memory.

[sirn]

Resident size. Normally ps -o rss,ucomm

[jeb]

I use linode, with Apache installed, since it's the default stack. Would it be a better idea to spend a day or two installing nginx? At the moment, Apache runs okay, is there an advantage to my installing nginx now?

[bradleyland]

There isn't nearly enough information in your post to make a good assessment.

What services are you running?

Are you using any Apache specific functionality?

Are you using an Apache module like mod_php, mod_python, etc, to host a webapp?

Do you need to serve more than one type of language through a single httpd server. E.g., a PHP app and a Rails app?

There is no one-size-fits-all web server. It's all dependent upon your specific needs.

[uggedal]

Nginx is single threaded, handeling incoming requests asynchronous. This architecture can scale to several thousand simultaneous requests. Apache on the other hand uses multiple os threads to handle simultaneous requests.