Herman Bos open source guerilla

Lighttpd performance

We use Lighttpd a lot these days to offload our Apache2 servers. More specific we use Lighttpd to serve all the static content (images, stylesheets, javascript files and such).

Since one of our customers wanted a clear view I did some performance testing. I used siege with 500 concurrent connections with a list of urls with all the available static files (little over 3000 files).

The results:

Lifting the server siege... done.
Transactions: 279582 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 300.51 secs
Data transferred: 2401.35 MB
Response time: 0.03 secs
Transaction rate: 930.36 trans/sec
Throughput: 7.99 MB/sec
Concurrency: 27.50
Successful transactions: 279499
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 3.20
Shortest transaction: 0.00


While sending out with a rate around 80Mbit and receiving around 7Mbit, the old Xeon server didn't get over a load of 0.20.

I knew lighttpd was good at its job, but this still surprised me positively. I didn't try to push it any futher but I would expect the server could have saturated a 1Gbit/s link if you look at these results. I bet Apache2 would not be able to come even close.