Serving static files: a comparison between Apache, Nginx, Varnish and G-WAN

The comments on this post are worth reading. It's impossible to construct a meaningful synthetic benchmark without more rigor about what client is being used, how it's configured, how the OS is tuned, testing against actual files (rather than a "Hello World" 100 byte file), details on default tuning for each webserver, and finally what exactly is intended to be tested and what is in fact being tested.

A great post on the subject from mnot:

http://www.mnot.net/blog/2011/05/18/http_benchmark_rules

Newer benchmark from the same author:

http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static...

This GWAN thing looks rather interesting. A bunch more benchmarks can be found on http://gwan.com/.

The G-Wan thing looks like it is created by a pretty odd person. And not open source.

Benchmarks that don't include standard deviations are worse than bad. They are dangerous.

Regarding Apache Traffic Server, here are some benchmarks: http://www.ogre.com/node/391