Performance evaluation of Raspberry pi 3B as a web server : Evaluating the performance of Raspberry pi 3B as a web server using nginx and apache2

Context. During the usage of a product, evaluating its performance quality is a crucial procedure. Web servers are one of the most used technological products in today’s modern world[1]. Thus, in this thesis we will evaluate and compare the performances of two web servers. The servers that are tested in the experiment are a raspberry pi 3B and a personal HP laptop. Objectives. The main objective of the study is to evaluate the performance of a raspberry pi 3B as a web server. In order to give a clearer image of how the raspberry pi performs, the laptop will also be evaluated and its performance will be used as a contrast during the study. Realization. To fulfill our objective, an experiment was conducted with the help of a performance testing tool called apache bench. To provide comprehensive performance results, the served content and the server software were altered throughout the experiment. The number of simulated users sending the requests were also altered. Results. The results were gathered by sending more than 1000 HTTP-requests to the two servers that served static and dynamic websites. The number of served requests per second and the CPU consumption of the servers were the recorded results. The raspberry pi exhibited response times as high as 1164 requests per second and CPU consumption that varied between ≈6% and ≈40%. In comparison to the laptop, on one occasion it exhibited a better processor utilization serving HTTPrequests of one user. Conclusions. Regardless of the used server software, although the laptop was slightly performing better, the raspberry pi had a closer response time in comparison to the laptop when both of them were serving a static website. On the contrary, when both were serving dynamic content the raspberry pi had a very low response time in the comparison. Out of the two used server software, nginx gave it a better CPU consumption in contrast to the laptop that had a better processor. That is irrespective of the served content type