A Performance Comparison of HTTP Servers in a 10G/40G Network

The performance of server-side applications is crucial for big data analytics. As HTTP web servers are widely used as back ends to run Web Services which are universally supported by big data technologies, and the emergence of high capacity networks adopted in enterprises and data centers today, the need to evaluate the performance of HTTP servers in new environment is increasing. In this paper, we compare the performance of three popular web servers in a 10G/40G network. We use a benchmarking tool apib to test the servers' throughputs under different request sizes ranged from 1KB to 256KB. Results show that the servers surveyed all have the ability to saturate the 40G network if the request granularity is big enough. We also found that nginx outperforms lighttpd and Apache if the requested resources are very small (e.g. less than 64KB), therefore, for frequent access to small files in big data applications, nginx is the best choice.