Apache under Windows Page 2

Back in December, 1999, I did some of my own testing. I was running
Apache and IIS on the same server, for a number of reasons that I won’t go
into here. So, the hardware is identical, and the server load is identical.
I did some benchmarking on a day immediately after Christmas, when hardly
anyone was in the office — this is an internal server — so server load was
not a factor. And I did the tests over a 100MB switched network, so network
latency was not really an issue either. But, regardless of that, conditions
were identical for each HTTP server.

Using a simple Perl program, I tested performance on the two servers. First,
I just fetched a 1K HTML document. Next, I got a simple ”hello world” Perl
CGI program, to test CGI performance. The results were pleasing:

        D:Apachecon>perl benchmark.pl
        GET
        Benchmark: timing 2000 iterations of Apache, IIS...
            Apache: 34 wallclock secs ( 6.71 usr +  4.42 sys = 11.13 CPU)
               IIS: 31 wallclock secs ( 6.75 usr +  4.41 sys = 11.16 CPU)
        CGI
        Benchmark: timing 2000 iterations of Apache, IIS...
            Apache: 62 wallclock secs ( 6.16 usr +  4.13 sys = 10.28 CPU)
               IIS: 65 wallclock secs ( 6.31 usr +  4.02 sys = 10.33 CPU)
        D:Apachecon>perl benchmark.pl
        GET
        Benchmark: timing 2000 iterations of Apache, IIS...
            Apache: 34 wallclock secs ( 6.50 usr +  4.55 sys = 11.05 CPU)
               IIS: 31 wallclock secs ( 6.65 usr +  4.43 sys = 11.08 CPU)
        CGI
        Benchmark: timing 2000 iterations of Apache, IIS...
            Apache: 63 wallclock secs ( 5.73 usr +  3.82 sys =  9.54 CPU)
               IIS: 64 wallclock secs ( 6.15 usr +  3.97 sys = 10.12 CPU)

If you're not familiar with the way that the Perl Benchmark module does

things, what those results mean is that Apache consistently outperformed IIS

on the two simplest things that a web server does - serving HTML pages, and

executing CGI programs. Yes, I ran more than just the two tests. These are

just sample results. And clearly, a .03 second difference over 2000

iterations is not a huge difference, but it was gratifying to see that

Apache consistently came out ahead.

In case you'd like to repeat the tests for yourself, here's the code that I

used:
        use Benchmark;
        use LWP::Simple;
        print "GETnn";
        timethese(2000, {
                'Apache' => 'get ("http://9.95.144.25/test.txt";)',
                'IIS' => 'get ("http://9.95.144.25:90/test.txt";)',
        });
        print "CGInn";
        timethese(2000, {

                'Apache' => 'get ("http://9.95.144.25/cgi-bin/test.pl";)',
                'IIS' => 'get ("http://9.95.144.25:90/scripts/test.pl";)',
        });

Now, IIS advocates will say that CGI is not the way that you are supposed to

do things on IIS. As of this writing, I don't yet know how to do stuff in

ASP, so I can't say how it compares to mod_perl. However, the Microsoft

claim has always been that IIS is substantially faster than Apache, and yet

it can't even serve a HTML document faster, on its own native platform.

So, while it is certainly true that Apache performs better on Unix than on

NT, it is no slouch on NT, and compares very well to its competition.

Yet Another Disclaimer