Drupal Performance Benchmark https://www.litespeedtech.com/images/logos/litespeed/litespeed-logo.png 2023-10-03 20:31:41 Which loads Drupal faster via HTTP/2: LiteSpeed Web Server, nginx or Apache? We ran a series of Drupal HTTP/2 benchmarks, to compare LSWS + LSCache, nginx + Varnish, and Apache + Varnish. LiteSpeed Drupal is 6X faster than nginx and 14X faster than Apache!

LiteSpeed Cache Makes Drupal 8 6X Times Faster!

Apache or nginx with Varnish can't touch LiteSpeed Web Server with LSCache for Drupal performance!

We put LiteSpeed Web Server with our LiteSpeed Cache module for Drupal to the test. Compared to nginx with Varnish and Apache with Varnish, LiteSpeed loads a Drupal 8 demo site up to 6 times faster than nginx and up to 14 times faster than Apache!

We followed the methodology found at http2benchmark.org, meaning our results are verifiable and repeatable.


Summary

HTTP/2 Test Results

h2load -n 100000 -c 10 -t 1 -T 5 -m 10 -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' https://domain.com/drupal/
Server Requests / Sec MB / Sec Failures Header Compression
LiteSpeed 58868.2 161.75 0 96.35%
nginx 8064.8 26.2 0 18.96%
Apache 4274.1 12.07 0 89.4%

Please note: we usually run the h2load test with -c 100, but in this case there were too many errors occurring with nginx and Apache. We reduced -c to 10 for this reason.

LiteSpeed Web Server performs 7X faster than nginx and 14X faster than Apache when loading Drupal 8 via HTTP/2.

HTTP 1.1 Test Results

wrk -c 100 -t 1 -d 5s -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' https://domain.com/drupal/
Server Requests / Sec MB / Sec Failures Header Compression
LiteSpeed 23850.4 78.65 N/A N/A
nginx 8324.59 28.69 N/A N/A
Apache 4286.43 14.66 N/A N/A

With an HTTP/1.1 connection, LiteSpeed Web Server performs 3X faster than nginx and 6X faster than Apache when loading Drupal 8.


Test Environment

  • Softwares Tested:

    • LiteSpeed Web Server v5.4.1
    • LiteSpeed cache: LiteSpeed Cache for Drupal
    • Drupal version: 8.7.7
    • nginx v1.16.1
    • Apache v2.4.41
    • Varnish 5.2.1
  • Setup:

    • LiteSpeed: LiteSpeed Web Server LiteSpeed Cache for Drupal
    • nginx: nginx (front proxy for HTTPS termination) Varnish nginx
    • Apache: nginx (front proxy for HTTPS termination) Varnish Apache
  • Client Machine:

    • Memory Size: 1GB
    • CPU number: 1
    • CPU Threads: 1
    • CPU Model: Virtual CPU 6db7dc0e7704
    • Disk: NVMe SSD
  • Server Machine:

    • Memory Size: 1GB
    • CPU number: 1
    • CPU Threads: 1
    • CPU Model: Virtual CPU 6db7dc0e7704
    • Disk: NVMe SSD
  • Network:

    • Traffic: 8.84 Gbits/sec
    • Latency: 0.383 ms