Fastest XenForo site I've seen, how are they so fast?
- Thread starter NealC
- Start date
ES Dev Team
Well-known member
..if you are running apache with something other than the default mod_php ( for example: using php-fpm instead ), you should expect that those individual PHP processes to lag heavily on closing tcp/ip connections.. which can mean that the default linux limitation of 1000 concurrent connections isn't high enough and will max out during peaks of AI scraper traffic.
The default timeout/keepalive and maximum processes for apache on high volume sites is much too low as well.
php-fpm on most applications tends to have 20% slower execution than mod_php.
..because of PHP-FPM's less efficient switching from PHP<->HTML, PHP will also typically run slower on nginx as well.
Nginx' main advantage is sending static files faster.
Mysql's default innodb buffer sizes are also non-ideal out of the box, and increasing them can lead to big boosts in performance over baseline.
Running your database on localhost is also critical for speed, since it will have ~0ms of per call latency.. since PHP is a non-asynchronous single threaded language by default.. a remote database ( even if in the same datacenter! ) will reduce performance of the PHP app proportionally to how many database calls there are on a page.
In AWS, i noticed that if you had an EC2 and RDB in the same datacenter, each database call has 2-3ms of lag before it executes the query.. so for a page with 10 database calls, add 25ms of wait time.
The default timeout/keepalive and maximum processes for apache on high volume sites is much too low as well.
php-fpm on most applications tends to have 20% slower execution than mod_php.
..because of PHP-FPM's less efficient switching from PHP<->HTML, PHP will also typically run slower on nginx as well.
Nginx' main advantage is sending static files faster.
Mysql's default innodb buffer sizes are also non-ideal out of the box, and increasing them can lead to big boosts in performance over baseline.
Running your database on localhost is also critical for speed, since it will have ~0ms of per call latency.. since PHP is a non-asynchronous single threaded language by default.. a remote database ( even if in the same datacenter! ) will reduce performance of the PHP app proportionally to how many database calls there are on a page.
In AWS, i noticed that if you had an EC2 and RDB in the same datacenter, each database call has 2-3ms of lag before it executes the query.. so for a page with 10 database calls, add 25ms of wait time.
Last edited:
What is the proof for this?
Many benchmarks shows that Nginx with php-fpm is faster than Apache with mod_php and if it goes on higher load then it loses even more.
ES Dev Team
Well-known member
My proof:
I've occasionally done this benchmark and seen that statement to consistently be true over the last few years.
Some PHP applications don't have a drop in performance with PHP-FPM. The majority do.
Nginx with php-fpm is faster than apache at serving static files. See what the parameters of a benchmark are before believing it, too many people like cherry picking.
Apache is by default tuned for low concurrency scenarios and nginx is default tuned for higher concurrency.
Both are tuneable within a few % of each other, performance wise.
I consistently chose apache because mod_php is snappier, and i don't administer any websites whose load is mostly serving static files.
If you wish to do this benchmarking yourself, i recommend you use a tool called 'wrk' which is a multithreaded http benchmarking tool.
This should be available in the ubuntu repos, thus easy to install.
versus something like apachebench, it's multithreaded, so you can perform some really high concurrency benchmarking scenarios. It's also a bit simpler to use than apachbench.
You can perform these tests yourself easily
I've occasionally done this benchmark and seen that statement to consistently be true over the last few years.
Some PHP applications don't have a drop in performance with PHP-FPM. The majority do.
Nginx with php-fpm is faster than apache at serving static files. See what the parameters of a benchmark are before believing it, too many people like cherry picking.
Apache is by default tuned for low concurrency scenarios and nginx is default tuned for higher concurrency.
Both are tuneable within a few % of each other, performance wise.
I consistently chose apache because mod_php is snappier, and i don't administer any websites whose load is mostly serving static files.
If you wish to do this benchmarking yourself, i recommend you use a tool called 'wrk' which is a multithreaded http benchmarking tool.
This should be available in the ubuntu repos, thus easy to install.
versus something like apachebench, it's multithreaded, so you can perform some really high concurrency benchmarking scenarios. It's also a bit simpler to use than apachbench.
You can perform these tests yourself easily
