As you may have gathered, I've been pushing Lighttpd as the better webserver for a while now.  I've finally taken the time to actually gather numbers to support that!  In this article, I'm going to cover the performance difference between Lighttpd 1.4.14 and Apache 2.2.4 when dealing with static files.  All displayed data is straight from Excel (exported from WebLOAD), with no tweaking.  These are the raw numbers (posted as graphs).

Test Hardware

Server

        The server I am using for testing is an IBM x335 series 1U rackmount server.  It has dual Xeon 2.4ghz processors, 2gb PC2100 ECC Ram, dual 36gb 10k SCSI drives in RAID 1, and dual 100mbit LAN cards.  The system is running on CentOS 5 linux with No gui.  Installed software include MySQL 5.0.24, PHP 5.2.2 (in both mod_php and fastcgi interfaces), BIND, SendMail, ProFTP and others.  System resources were monitered durring tests via the "vmstat" command.

Client

        The client machine used to generate the loads is an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with 2gb PC4000 RAM, 180gb SATA primary HD, 300gb SATA storage/swap drive, dual Gigabit Lan cards.  It's running Windows XP Pro.  The load generator used is WebLOAD.  I'll give some more information about the load generator setup when we get into the benchmarks.

Network

        The network includes a Netgear 24port 10/100 switch between the client and the server, and a 8 port gigabit switch running a fileserver behind the two (the 10/100 provides connectivity to all the computers and devices in the house, where the GB switch only connects the file server, client, server, and a media device.