Not Even Close: Ruby LSAPI 4.1 Bests Nginx + Passenger (Another Benchmark)

Part 2 — Downloading

In the last post, we benchmarked the uploading speed of LSWS 4.2.2 (with Ruby LSAPI 4.1) against Nginx with Passenger for a Ruby Rails Rack application. But rewindableinput was not our only change in Ruby LSAPI 4.1. We also made a series of small tweaks designed to speed up downloads from Ruby applications using Rack. With all that fresh Nginx blood on our hands from the previous benchmark (yes, we’re quite aware that it’s hypothetical blood from an oversimplified experiment — all the better, we’re pacifists), we couldn’t stop ourselves from running a benchmark to see how the two server softwares match up when downloading different amounts of data generated by a Rack application. And we liked the answer. Here’s the summary: (Again, this is LSWS 4.2.2 and Ruby LSAPI 4.1 vs. Nginx 1.2.6 with Passenger 3.0.19, both using applications with Ruby 1.9.3p374, Rails 3.2.11, and Rack 1.4.3.)

Nginx + Passenger performed significantly better in the download benchmarking, but still nowhere near LiteSpeed’s, um, speed. Again, we see the gap between the two narrowing as the downloads get larger and more weight falls on the app. While both these benchmarks are just one dimensional looks at server speed, we feel they do demonstrate a difference between us and Nginx. We’d love to hear what you think.

Configurations and detailed results can be found here.