A performance analysis of popular web servers (Apache & NGiNX) with different configurations and optimizations.

Fast and responsive web server performance is increasingly important for enhancing the userexperience of a web-page which in turn will help to create success for an organisation. Thisdissertation analyses the performance of the two current most popular web servers, Apacheand NGiNX, with different configurations such as HTTPS and Load Balancing, also withoptimizations such as Compression, Caching and HTTP/2 enabled. The servers are putthrough different levels of load using a load testing tool (H2Load) and performance ismeasured in the form of CPU load, memory usage, time taken for request and response, andthe error rate. The results find that both web servers have strong points and performdifferently based on which configuration is used and that neither web server can beconsidered the best overall, but recommendations are made at the end of the work for whichweb server is the best in different scenarios and use cases