Another Great Web Server "hiawatha-webserver" :)

Yeah interesting not enough experience with Hiawatha but did read it doesn't do compression so you bandwidth usage will increase and no SSL SNI support Hiawatha 7.0 and beyond - Weblog - Hiawatha webserver - so does rule it out for me (unless you're happy with higher bandwidth usage and needing a dedicated IP address for each SSL host you have on the server)

wonder how other web servers would fair if they also turned of gzip compression altogether ?

edit: also faq says the same F.A.Q. - Hiawatha webserver

 

digging up very old benchmarks i did

Hiawatha 9.4 back in April 2014 on port 81 while Centmin Mod on port 80

Code:

curl -I http://localhost:81/29257_phpi.php
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 18:05:06 GMT
Server: Hiawatha v9.4
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-type: text/html

curl -I http://localhost/29257_phpi.php
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx centminmod
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 18:05:12 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding

PHP Info page and html pages, check the data transferred size differences due to Hiawatha not doing on the fly gzip compression = 6.2x times higher bandwidth consumed with Hiawatha compared to Nginx

Code:

Hiawatha phpi.php file

data transferred
70.28MB to 180.58MB

Nginx phpi.php file

data transferred
11.28MB to 28.94MB

For Hiawatha maintenance.html html file = 3x times higher bandwidth used with Hiawatha compared to Nginx

Code:

data transferred
21.79MB

Nginx phpi.php file

data transferred
7.26MB

Hiawatha

Code:

siege -i -d3 -c50 -t30s http://localhost:81/29257_phpi.php

Transactions:                    973 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                  29.90 secs
Data transferred:              70.28 MB
Response time:                  0.01 secs
Transaction rate:              32.54 trans/sec
Throughput:                     2.35 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.30
Successful transactions:         973
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.12
Shortest transaction:           0.00

siege -q -i -d3 -c50 -r50 http://localhost:81/29257_phpi.php

Transactions:                   2500 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                  91.40 secs
Data transferred:             180.58 MB
Response time:                  0.01 secs
Transaction rate:              27.35 trans/sec
Throughput:                     1.98 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.18
Successful transactions:        2500
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.22
Shortest transaction:           0.00

siege -q -i -d2 -c100 -r100 http://localhost:81/nginx-logo.png

Transactions:                  10000 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                 115.27 secs
Data transferred:             146.69 MB
Response time:                  0.01 secs
Transaction rate:              86.75 trans/sec
Throughput:                     1.27 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.85
Successful transactions:       10000
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            1.68
Shortest transaction:           0.00
siege -q -i -d2 -c100 -r100 http://localhost:81/maintenance.html

Transactions:                  10000 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                 114.38 secs
Data transferred:              21.79 MB
Response time:                  0.00 secs
Transaction rate:              87.43 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.19 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.23
Successful transactions:       10000
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            1.01
Shortest transaction:           0.00

Centmin Mod Nginx with default gzip enabled

Code:

siege -i -d3 -c50 -t30s http://localhost/29257_phpi.php

Transactions:                    972 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                  29.26 secs
Data transferred:              11.25 MB
Response time:                  0.01 secs
Transaction rate:              33.22 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.38 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.46
Successful transactions:         972
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.09
Shortest transaction:           0.00

siege -q -i -d3 -c50 -r50 http://localhost/29257_phpi.php

Transactions:                   2500 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                  93.80 secs
Data transferred:              28.94 MB
Response time:                  0.01 secs
Transaction rate:              26.65 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.31 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.28
Successful transactions:        2500
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.16
Shortest transaction:           0.00

siege -q -i -d2 -c100 -r100 http://localhost/nginx-logo.png


Transactions:                  10000 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                 121.28 secs
Data transferred:             146.69 MB
Response time:                  0.00 secs
Transaction rate:              82.45 trans/sec
Throughput:                     1.21 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.15
Successful transactions:       10000
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.03
Shortest transaction:           0.00

siege -q -i -d2 -c100 -r100 http://localhost/maintenance.html

Transactions:                  10000 hits
Availability:                 100.00 %
Elapsed time:                 117.54 secs
Data transferred:               7.26 MB
Response time:                  0.00 secs
Transaction rate:              85.08 trans/sec
Throughput:                     0.06 MB/sec
Concurrency:                    0.25
Successful transactions:       10000
Failed transactions:               0
Longest transaction:            0.06
Shortest transaction:           0.00

 

Nginx can be tuned better to handle slowris specifically.. FYI, they benchmarked out of box Nginx defaults

 

well yeah and fact is Centmin Mod Nginx tuned defaults are better than Nginx out of box install defaults and should handle slowris attacks much better

 

hehe those are reserved for paid consult clients as part of the process is analysis and monitoring each clients specific work loads and usage stats and devising custom tailored and optimised settings for that work load and server environment. You can't have a set and forget set of options as not all servers and sites' work loads are the same

 

then I'd be out of paid work in the $$$$ range !

FYI, my paid consult work is what allows me time to put into Centmin Mod development as well

 

Curious how Centmin Mod Nginx fairs with slowhttptest tool for slowris testing against my Wordpress test blog's static html file at Test Page for the Centmin Mod Nginx HTTP Server (2GB DigitalOcean KVM VPS server)

Chris at Performance testing while under attack - Weblog - Hiawatha webserver didn't provide the exact slowhttptest parameters used but I tried to figure it out based on the last OpenLiteSpeed test result output on that page and came up with these slowhttptest parameters

Code:

URL=http://wordpress7.centminmod.com/default_nginxindex.html

slowhttptest -c 4096 -H -g -o slowhttptest_centminmod_nginx_1 -i 10 -l 240 -t GET -u $URL -p 3

result was as follows




oh i see i used default 50 connections a second, need to retest with the 128 connections a second Chris used

 

Above slowhttptest used 50 connections per sec default parameters, but if I read correctly Chris used 128 connections per second test parameters so here's the test again

Code:

URL=http://wordpress7.centminmod.com/default_nginxindex.html

slowhttptest -c 4096 -H -g -o slowhttptest_centminmod_nginx_2 -i 10 -l 240 -t GET -u $URL -p 3 -r 128

 

Chris also has a higher slowris test with 65539 connections, 512 connections per second and 900 second test duration test at http://pub.dotbalm.org/hiawatha_v_apache_2014-02-27/hiawatha-9_4.html which peaked at 821 connections (orange line)

Recreating that test on my Wordpress test blog's static html file at Test Page for the Centmin Mod Nginx HTTP Server (2GB DigitalOcean KVM VPS server) with Centmin Mod 1.2.3-eva2000.08 beta LEMP web stack - Nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB, CSF Firewall on CentOS 7.0

Code:

URL=http://wordpress7.centminmod.com/default_nginxindex.html

slowhttptest -c 65539 -H -g -o slowhttptest_centminmod_nginx_2 -i 10 -l 900 -t GET -u $URL -p 3 -r 512

looks like test ends at 557th second when no open connections left

 

What my above tests for slowhttptest against Centmin Mod LEMP web stack's Nginx show is there's a huge difference between out of box Nginx defaults shown here versus a tuned Nginx configuration

 

heh

More examples of slowhttptest and what the results mean at Security Labs: Testing Web Servers for Slow HTT... | Qualys Community

 

Added Newrelic server stats for above slowhttptest too