Introduction

Web servers are an integral part of the internet that enable us to access web pages using HTTP protocol. A web server is responsible for processing requests made by clients and responding with the requested information. Apache Tomcat and Nginx are two popular open-source web servers that are widely used by individuals and businesses. In this blog post, we will compare the performance of these two web servers and help you choose the one that meets your requirements.

Performance Comparison

Before we delve into the performance comparison, let's briefly discuss what Apache Tomcat and Nginx web servers are and their respective features.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat is an open-source Servlet container used for deploying Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java Servlets. It is widely used for hosting Java-based web applications and is compatible with a variety of platforms.

Nginx

Nginx is an open-source web server that is commonly used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. It is known for its ability to handle a large number of concurrent connections and is widely used in high-performance computing environments.

Test Environment

We conducted the performance test on a Linux-based server with the following specifications:

• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-920 CPU @ 2.67GHz
• 16GB RAM
• Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS
• Apache Tomcat v9.0.62
• Nginx v1.14.0

Test Methodology

We used Apache JMeter to simulate 1000 concurrent users making requests to a sample web application running on both Apache Tomcat and Nginx web servers. The test ran for 10 minutes with a ramp-up period of 30 seconds.

Results

Based on the test results, Nginx outperformed Apache Tomcat in terms of requests per second (RPS) and average response time. Here's a quick comparison of the results:

As we can see, Nginx was able to handle almost 3 times the number of requests per second as compared to Apache Tomcat. Additionally, Nginx had a significantly lower average response time which means that it was able to respond to client requests faster.

Conclusion

Based on the test results, we can conclude that Nginx outperforms Apache Tomcat in terms of performance. However, the choice of a web server ultimately depends on the specific use case and requirements. While Nginx may be more suitable for high-performance scenarios, Apache Tomcat is more widely used for hosting Java-based web applications.

References

• Apache Tomcat documentation: https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/index.html
• Nginx documentation: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/web-server/
• Apache JMeter: https://jmeter.apache.org/