nodejs-reverse-proxy-benchmarks

This is a companion repository for our blog post, "Why should I use a Reverse Proxy if Node.js is Production-Ready?"

You will probably want to download a recent stable version of Nginx to perform these benchmarks. You'll also want a recent stable version of Node.js as well.

If you compile Nginx from source make sure you provide the --with-http_ssl_module flag, otherwise the SSL tests will fail.

These tests currently use a single Nginx worker thread via the worker_processes 1; directive. Running them again with 2 workers would yield faster Nginx performance at a trade-off of more memory usage.

The HTTP benchmarks used for the article are done with the siege tool, though any HTTP benchmarking tool should work fine.

Our Results

	req/sec	approx memory
nginx	25,445	46.1MB
nginx-ssl	959	46.4MB
node	9,881	601MB
node-ssl	746	614MB
nginx-node	8,117	652MB
nginx-ssl-node	865	652MB
node-cluster	8,006	1,768MB
nginx-cluster-node	7,908	1,253MB
node-gzip	5,047	598MB
nginx-gzip-node	7,590	652MB

Running the Benchmarks

The following sections contain instruction for recreating each of the benchmark results:

nginx

nginx -c nginx.conf -p .
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b http://localhost:8080/

nginx-ssl

./gen-ssl.sh # only needs to be run once
nginx -c nginx-ssl.conf -p .
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b https://localhost:8443/

node

./node.js 8080
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b http://localhost:8080/

node-ssl

./gen-ssl.sh # only needs to be run once
./node-ssl.js
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b https://localhost:8443/

nginx-node

./node.js 8081
nginx -c nginx-node.conf -p .
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b http://localhost:8080/

nginx-ssl-node

./gen-ssl.sh # only needs to be run once
./node.js 8081
nginx -c nginx-ssl-node.conf -p .
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b https://localhost:8443/

node-cluster

./node-cluster.js
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b http://localhost:8080/

nginx-cluster-node

./node.js 8081
./node.js 8082
nginx -c nginx-cluster-node.conf -p .
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b http://localhost:8080/

node-gzip

./node-gzip.js
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b http://localhost:8080/

nginx-gzip-node

./node.js 8081
nginx -c nginx-gzip-node.conf -p .
siege -c 10 -r 20000 -b http://localhost:8080/