Apache becoming outdated?

Jimmy Ruska's Blog

Feb 15

Apache becoming outdated? Posted on Friday, February 15 2008

Apache is open source and insanely optimized with tens or hundreds of millions of domains using it, but many competitors are emerging that put its continued popularity in question. The most recent of which is Nginx, which was originally designed to be the server for one of russia's biggest search portals/engines, rambler. Those crazy russian hackers are known to to be some of the best. The brilliant russians finally found another hobby to play other than chess while it's cold as hell (wait, what?) most the year.

Wikipedia has a nice comparison of lightweight webservers. Site's offer dynamic content can still programs like memcached to see massive performance increases (originally made for livejournal). Sometimes you can use a combination of webservers. For example youtube had used lightspeed for it's thumbnails, while something else for handling it's dynamic content. How is the average site owner supposed to know the performance differences between webservers? Buying a test server and benchmarking can be expensive and tedious. 3rd party reports can easily be biased or forged since it's a profitable industry. The best way is to check the emerging statistics on webserver use. Large corporations own a massive quantity of sites on the web, and they'll be sure to throw big money for research and testing to ensure they have the most efficient and cost effective setup possible.

Here's the statistics based on the 2008 Necraft Website Survey.

Vendor	Product	Web Sites
Apache	Apache	78374121
Microsoft	IIS	55704513
Google	GFE	8287294
Unknown	Unknown	3326340
Oversee	Oversee	1603182
lighttpd	lighttpd	1536981
Other	Other	1033668
nginx	nginx	842206
Zeus	Zeus	504680
IdeaWebServer	IdeaWebServer	454427
LiteSpeed	LiteSpeed	432442
Apache	Coyote	361198
Sun	Sun-ONE-Web-Server	341308
Resin	Resin	298569
Jetty	Jetty	228789
RapidSite	RapidSite	220070
Sun	Enterprise	200169
tigershark	tigershark	188877
NOYB	NOYB	171371
htt pd	htt pd	162693
Squeegit	Squeegit	146348
WebserverX	WebserverX	143372
BaseHTTP	BaseHTTP	138248
Blk-Enterprise	Blk-Enterprise	110650
Lotus	Lotus-Domino	88419
IBM	IBM_HTTP_Server	87363
iCESrapture	iCESrapture	62423
Zope	Zope	53202
ConcentricHost-Ashurbanipal	ConcentricHost-Ashurbanipal	50042
AOLserver	AOLserver	34534
Forwarder	Forwarder	33468
ZX_Spectrum	ZX_Spectrum	31909
ForAll.pl	ForAll.pl	29592
IPL	IPL	28865
Acenet	Acenet	28750
Joker.com	Joker.com	26597
Mongrel	Mongrel	25684
az-webserver	az-webserver	25517
Dina	Dina	24886
a	a	24705
Web	Web	23297
thttpd	thttpd	21435
Oracle	Oracle-Application-Server-10g	21426
thttpd	thttpd-TOF	13801
Sun	Sun-Java-System-Web-Server	8420
Oracle	Oracle	5962

It's really unfortunate 55 million sites run microsoft servers.

Tags: apache vs lightspeed, apache vs lighttpd, nginx vs apache, nginx vs lighttpd

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