I often see “Apache vs Nginx” discussions appearing on reddit and some of the arguments people make are plain ridiculous. So now I want to address one that makes my eyes roll the post: PHP-FPM.
When Nginx first came into PHP world its popularity was mostly fueled by numerous benchmarks showcasing its speed vs a LAMP setup. You see Nginx didn’t have anything like Apaches’ mod_php and required the use of PHP-FPM, which indeed was a much faster way of processing PHP on multicore systems. The mistake people often did was to compare those setups and conclude that Nginx was just a better HTTP server.
Nginx is a great webserver, and its default setup is designed for performance, while the default Apache setup provides much more in terms of flexibility. But please don’t say that Nginx is better just because PHP-FPM is faster than mod_php, when you can easily setup Apache to use FPM too
One of the contributing reasons is that there is so many different configuration options in Apache that a person can easily misconfigure it. Apache has 3 MPMs: prefork, worker and event and even proxying request to the PHP-FPM server can be done in at least 3 entirely different ways. Nginx is easier to set up if you’re looking for a “good enough” solution, it’ll run pretty good out of the box.
At that time I thought people would eventually understand the actual difference and judge webservers on their own merits, but years passed and it’s still happening! So pretty much now we have 4 categories of developers:
- People that use Apache because it comes with windows packages like WAMP and is very easy to setup on any Linux distro. These people don’t care how their PHP is executed at all
- People that read a blog post that Apache isn’t cool anymore, installed Nginx with PHP-FPM and consider the first group to be inferior and less tech savvy.
- People that are supporting a legacy app, are stuck with an old version of Apache ( maybe 1.3 even ), and think moving to Nginx would boost their performance sky-high
- And there obviously is a portion of developers that actually have experience in both and can select the one that fits the task the best
The problem is that most of the “Apache vs Nginx comparison” posts are written by the first 3 groups of people. The fourth group has long ago realized that there is enough info on the internet to stop talking about it over and over.
The lessons you should take from this post are:
- Try running Apache 2.4 with mpm_event and PHP-FPM using ProxyPass and see the results you get
- If you have only a single core PHP-FPM won’t be faster than mod_php ( it’ll take a separate blog post to explain why )
- In tech, never pick a single side, stay flexible
- If you need performance use HHVM
January 2, 2015 at 12:34 pm
I prefer Nginx because it’s capable of serving static content more quickly under heavy load while using less memory than Apache.
January 2, 2015 at 6:27 pm
Now you have clouded the waters with logic.
January 2, 2015 at 8:54 pm
First they (they, as in, the general set of developers) move from Apache to Nginx. Then the realize Nginx isn’t all that easy to configure and the lack of .htaccess _is_ actually a problem. And then they move back to Apache, but with the lessons learned from the Nginx setup: PHP-FPM.