This tool is useful for testing the differences betwen Nginx and Apache by having the same PHP based website being served up by both webservers. I have been using this tool to demonstrate/test the handling of large bursts of incoming requests.
Here is a video of me using the tool.
The Nginx configuration has been optimized for a dual core server. If you want to test against a larger core count, then please adjust the nginx/php-fpm-pool.conf file so that pm.max_children is set to your number of cores x 2.
Clone the repository.
git clone https://github.com/programster/nginx-apache-comparison.git
Navigate to within the folder and build the images by executing the build script I created for you.
bash build.sh
When that has finished, deploy your nginx and apache webservers by executing the deploy script.
bash deploy.sh
Now you can stress test the different webservers using the Apache Bench tool. Remember that nginx responds on port 8080 and Apache responds on port 8000.
E.g.
# Apache - burst of 100 requests
ab -n 100 -c 100 http://nginx-testing.programster.org:8000/
# Nginx - burst of 100 requests
ab -n 100 -c 100 http://nginx-testing.programster.org:8000/
It is also worth noting that after testing the Apache webserver, a lot of memory will be left over still being utilized so I re-deploy (by executing bash deploy.sh) before running the tests on Nginx.