Cherokee web server as an Apache alternative

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Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, Virtual hosts, Authentication, on the fly encoding, Load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more.

A user friendly interface called cherokee-admin is provided for a no-hassle configuration of the server. Check out the benchmarks and documentation to learn more, and give it a try to squeeze your hardware to the fullest!

Benchmarks --> http://www.cherokee-project.com/benchmarks.html

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The benchmark consisted on half a million requests of a 1.7KiB static file, with 20 concurrent clients, using a 1Gbit/s local network. The results (fastest to slowest) were:

Cherokee:

Server Software: Cherokee/0.8.1

Server Hostname: 10.0.0.102

Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.html

Document Length: 1795 bytes

Concurrency Level: 20

Time taken for tests: 17.819725 seconds

Complete requests: 500000

Failed requests: 0

Write errors: 0

Keep-Alive requests: 500000

Total transferred: 999007442 bytes

HTML transferred: 897506630 bytes

Requests per second: 28058.79 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request: 0.713 [ms] (mean)

Time per request: 0.036 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate: 54747.93 [Kbytes/sec] received

Lighttpd:

Server Software: lighttpd/1.4.19

Server Hostname: 10.0.0.102

Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.html

Document Length: 1795 bytes

Concurrency Level: 20

Time taken for tests: 21.248000 seconds

Complete requests: 500000

Failed requests: 0

Write errors: 0

Keep-Alive requests: 470598

Total transferred: 991856958 bytes

HTML transferred: 897503590 bytes

Requests per second: 23531.63 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request: 0.850 [ms] (mean)

Time per request: 0.042 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate: 45585.94 [Kbytes/sec] received

NginX:

Server Software: nginx/0.5.33

Server Hostname: 10.0.0.102

Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.html

Document Length: 1795 bytes

Concurrency Level: 20

Time taken for tests: 23.741872 seconds

Complete requests: 500000

Failed requests: 0

Write errors: 0

Keep-Alive requests: 500000

Total transferred: 1006000217 bytes

HTML transferred: 897500000 bytes

Requests per second: 21059.84 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request: 0.950 [ms] (mean)

Time per request: 0.047 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate: 41379.30 [Kbytes/sec] received

Apache2.2:

Server Software: Apache/2.2.8

Server Hostname: 10.0.0.102

Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.html

Document Length: 1795 bytes

Concurrency Level: 20

Time taken for tests: 35.438605 seconds

Complete requests: 500000

Failed requests: 0

Write errors: 0

Keep-Alive requests: 495064

Total transferred: 1043777896 bytes

HTML transferred: 897500000 bytes

Requests per second: 14108.91 [#/sec] (mean)

Time per request: 1.418 [ms] (mean)

Time per request: 0.071 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Transfer rate: 28762.81 [Kbytes/sec] received

For the record: I did my best configuring all the servers in the very same way. In all the cases I removed unnecessary rules that could have slowed down the server (checks for htpasswd files and so on). And all the binaries came from the Debian repository, except for Cherokee 0.8.1 that hasn't been packaged yet.

Original thread: http://forums.cpanel.net/f145/cherokee-web-server-apache-alternative-98945.html