Web Server Performance of Apache and Nginx: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Web Server performance is cardinal to effective and efficient Information communication. Performance measures include response time and service rate, memory usage, CPU utilization among others. A review of various studies indicates a close comparison among different web servers that included Apache, IIS, Nginx and Lighttpd among others. The results of various studies indicates that response time, CPU utilization and memory usage varied with different web servers depending on the model used. However, it was found that Nginx out performed Apache on many metrics that included response time, CPU utilization and memory usage. Nginx performance under these metrics showed that its memory (in case of memory) does not increase with increased requests. It was concluded that though Nginx out performed Apache, both web servers are powerful, flexible and capable and the decision of which web server to adopt is entirely dependent on the need of the user. Since some metric such as uptime (the amount of time that a server stays up and running properly) which reflects the reliability and availability of the server and also landing page speed was not included, we propose that future studies should consider uptime and landing page speed in the testing of web server performance.

Keywords: web server, web server performance, apache, Nginx