PHP processing speed apache 2.4 mpm-prefork mod_php 5.4 vs nginx 1.2.x PHP-FPM 5.4

Question

I've been looking for days to see if someone has done a good, documented, PHP processing speed comparison between

• apache-mpm-prefork 2.4 with mod_php 5.4

and

• nginx 1.2.x + PHP-FPM 5.4

Why I'm looking: The only test I saw are abount benchmarks, serving full pages or Hello, World -like test, without proper documentation on what exactly was tested. I don't care about the request/seconds, the hardware, but I do need to see what PHP script was tested and with what exact configuration.

Why these two: mod_php was known to be the fastest on processing PHP ( no static files, no request/response measuring, just processing the PHP itself ) but a lot has changed since then, including apache version. Nginx and PHP-FPM eats a lot less memory, so it'd be a good reason to change architecture but if they're not fast enough in this case, the change would be irrelevant.

I know if I'm unable to find one I have to do it myself but I can't believe no one has done a test like this so far :)

Answer 1

I have completed this test on CentOS 6.3 using nginx 1.2.7, apache 2.4.3 and php 5.4.12 all compiled with no changes to default.

./configure
make && make install

With the exception of php where I enabled php-fpm

./configure --enable-fpm

All servers have 100% default config except as noted below. All testing was done on a test server, with no load and a reboot between tests. The server has a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230, 1GB RAM and 2 x 60GB SSD in RAID 1. Tests were run using ab -n 50000 -c 500 http://127.0.0.1/test.php

Test PHP script:

<?php

$testing = 0;

for ($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++) {

    $testing++;

}

echo $testing;

I also had to enable php in nginx.conf as it's not enabled by default.

location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/html$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}

Nginx - PHP-FPM on 127.0.0.1:9000

Concurrency Level:      500
Time taken for tests:   10.932 seconds
Complete requests:      50000
Failed requests:        336
   (Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 336, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      336
Total transferred:      7837824 bytes
HTML transferred:       379088 bytes
Requests per second:    4573.83 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       109.317 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.219 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          700.17 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0   34 338.5      0    7000
Processing:     0   34 166.5     23    8120
Waiting:        0   34 166.5     23    8120
Total:         13   68 409.2     23    9846

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     23
  66%     28
  75%     32
  80%     33
  90%     34
  95%     46
  98%     61
  99%   1030
 100%   9846 (longest request)

Nginx - PHP-FPM via socket (config change to fastcgi_pass)

fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/lib/php/php.sock;

Concurrency Level:      500
Time taken for tests:   7.054 seconds
Complete requests:      50000
Failed requests:        351
   (Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 351, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      351
Total transferred:      7846209 bytes
HTML transferred:       387083 bytes
Requests per second:    7087.70 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       70.545 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.141 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1086.16 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0   26 252.5      0    7001
Processing:     0   24 112.9     17    3683
Waiting:        0   24 112.9     17    3683
Total:          7   50 306.4     17    7001

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     17
  66%     19
  75%     20
  80%     21
  90%     23
  95%     31
  98%     55
  99%   1019
 100%   7001 (longest request)

Apache - mod_php

Concurrency Level:      500
Time taken for tests:   10.979 seconds
Complete requests:      50000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      9800000 bytes
HTML transferred:       200000 bytes
Requests per second:    4554.02 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       109.793 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.220 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          871.67 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0   22 230.2      1    7006
Processing:     0   58 426.0     18    9612
Waiting:        0   58 425.9     18    9611
Total:          5   80 523.8     19   10613

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     19
  66%     23
  75%     25
  80%     26
  90%     31
  95%     36
  98%   1012
  99%   1889
 100%  10613 (longest request)

I'll be more than happy to tune apache further, but it seems apache just can't keep up. The clear winner is nginx with php-fpm via socket.