If you could travel back to the year 2000 and ask me what HTTP server I rolled with you would get a very loud and proud response of Apache. Everyone and their brother who was writing web applications in the opensource space back then loved using the word LAMP ( Linux Apache MySQL PHP ). That star-eyed developer now doesn’t use LAMP for opensource web, and it was hard going for some time relearning a new toolset.

The content on my site right now is being served with Nginx and that should give you an idea to which of the two web servers I prefer. So you know where I am now, but how did I get to a place of prefering it over my once go-to Apache? Several years back I took on a web job where my employer was dead set on using Ruby as the language. Up until then I had been using my trusty LAMP stack so my first instinct was to change up PHP for Ruby and keep on trucking like I always had.

All other things aside; I finally had a Ruby web application sitting behind Apache. The numbers I was seeing with reply times was somewhat depressing. I knew that the speed wouldn’t be the same as Apache with PHP or that the blazing numbers I was getting off of my development machine… but it was just plain terrible. I distinctly remember getting reply times of roughly 50ms in development and found myself looking at numbers around the ~300ms ballpark.

Six times the amount of time, let alone the fact the requests where taking a third of second was unacceptable for me. Upon my search on how to get a Rack server going with Apache I remembered seeing tutorials for Nginx. After exhausting all the performance tips I knew of for Apache I decided to spin up another server and tested it out. After the switch and before tuning I was already blessed with times of ~120ms; which I felt was pretty acceptable. After some tuning and socket magic I was able to get those numbers down to ~100ms.

I am by no means saying Apache sucks and Nginx is the end-all be-all by any means. I still think Apache is a fantastic webserver with more features and modules then you could shake a stick at. And I am sure that for some companies out there it is a fantastic solution. I will always hold a special place in my heart for Apache; but as for me and my house, Nginx fits the bill quite nicely.

For any of my PHP brethren out there who hold firm to Apache, I urge you to at least give Nginx a spin. My research shows that for raw execution time they are about the same in response times; however, Nginx has a far smaller memory footprint and blows the doors off of Apache with static file delivery.