Magento 1.9 Benchmark

LiteSpeed vs. Nginx vs. Apache

In this benchmark, we compare the performance of LiteSpeed Web Server to Nginx and Apache both with and without cache. We measured averages for these servers across three statistics: requests handled per second, maximum transaction time in seconds, and throughput in megabytes per second. These three factors are all important parts of server performance that influence stability, performance, and scalability.

This graph shows the effects that SSL has on web pages, with caching enabled and each page being parsed, with each user visiting 1-10 & 100 pages before leaving. After visiting 10 pages, we see that LiteSpeed Enterprise + LiteMage Cache performs 10% faster than LiteSpeed Enterprise 5.1.9 + LiteMage 1.2.4, 266% faster than Apache + Varnish, and 514% faster than Nginx + Varnish.

This graph shows the effects that SSL has on average server load when requesting web pages, with caching enabled and each page being parsed, with each user visiting 1-10 & 100 pages before leaving. Over the course of 10 minutes, LiteSpeed Enterprise + LiteMage Cache has 42% lower load than LiteSpeed Enterprise 5.1.9 + LiteMage 1.2.4, 139% lower load than Apache + Varnish, and 227% lower load than Nginx + Varnish.

Turpentine Cookie Bypass

Turpentine has a built-in "benchmark" mode that treats any requests detected as coming from a benchmarking tool as a crawler request, hard coding the frontend cookie to 'frontend=crawler-session'. This mode will use the same cached private blocks for all page requests, regardless of who is actually visiting the page, completely avoiding the backend by breaking Magento functionality. This was likely implemented to get better benchmarking performance than is actually possible by Varnish in a real word scenario.

LiteMage Cache on the other hand is optimized to completely avoid the PHP backend for catalog browsing without breaking any Magento functionality. Even with Varnish's unrealistic "benchmark" mode, LiteSpeed Enterprise + LiteMage Cache is still 67% faster than Varnish + Apache, and 180% faster than Varnish + Nginx.

Notes:

• Opcode caching was used for all setups.
• The test was performed over at Digital Ocean all in NYC1 Datacenter.