Vincent Negrier, also known as sIX, presented to the public the first web server written entirely in PHP. The full name of the product is the aEGiS PHP nano web server, but users, and the author himself, shorten this name to just Nanoweb. In a short README supplied with the server sources, the author explains why we should use this miracle of programming thought. And the first thing he pays attention to is that the server turned out to be nimble and stable. As for sustainability, the report on the project’s website says the following: “For 101 days of uptime, the server did not show a single problem with performance, during this time it served more than 4.1 million requests with a total “weight” of more than 52 gigabytes.” We will talk about performance a little later, but for now we will list the main features of this miracle server:
– compatible with HTTP/1.1;
– simple but rich configuration options;
– modular architecture;
– Support for FastCGI, CGI and Server side includes (SSI);
– virtual hosts, addressable by name or port;
– access control lists (Access control lists, ACLs);
– support for authentication via htpasswd, MySQL, PostgreSQL and LDAP;
– support for themes for server-generated content;
– Apache compatible log format;
– SSL support via external modules;
– protection against DoS attacks;
– support for filters and compression;
– support for RBL blacklists (mail-abuse.org);
– support for HTTP protocol extensions (new methods);
– and much more.
As for performance, the test results are posted on the developer’s website. Here’s a look at the output of the diagnostic program ab (Apache benchmark) after the end of the test, consisting of 500 requests (20 simultaneous) to static and dynamic content. The measurements were carried out on a machine with an AMD Duron 700 processor and one gigabyte of RAM.
Static test:
Server Software: aEGiS_nanoweb/2.0.1-dev
Server Hostname: si.kz
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /six.gif
Document Length: 28352 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 3.123 seconds
Complete requests: 500
Failed requests: 0
Broken pipe errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 497
Total transferred: 14496686 bytes
HTML transferred: 14337322 bytes
Requests per second: 160.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 124.92 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 6.25 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 4641.91 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connnection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 1.9 0 13
Processing: 18 100 276.4 40 2739
Waiting: 1 97 276.9 39 2739
Total: 18 100 277.8 40 2750
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 40
66% 49
75% 59
80% 69
90% 146
95% 245
98% 449
99% 1915
100% 2750 (last request)
Dynamic test (PHP 4, CGI):
Server Software: aEGiS_nanoweb/2.0.1-dev
Server Hostname: si.kz
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /index.php
Document Length: 1606 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 70.509 seconds
Complete requests: 500
Failed requests: 0
Broken pipe errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 0
Total transferred: 921500 bytes
HTML transferred: 803000 bytes
Requests per second: 7.09 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2820.36 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 141.02 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 13.07 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connnection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 2.1 0 12
Processing: 388 2785 785.6 2779 4860
Waiting: 372 2784 785.7 2779 4859
Total: 388 2785 785.5 2779 4860
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 2779
66% 3099
75% 3286
80% 3378
90% 3802
95% 4241
98% 4530
99% 4631
100% 4860 (last request)
Dynamic test (PHP 4, FastCGI):
Server Software: aEGiS_nanoweb/1.8.0-dev
Server Hostname: si.kz
Server Port: 80
Document Path: /index.php
Document Length: 1606 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 6.817 seconds
Complete requests: 500
Failed requests: 0
Broken pipe errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 488
Total transferred: 946925 bytes
HTML transferred: 803000 bytes
Requests per second: 73.35 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 272.68 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 13.63 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 138.91 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connnection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 1
Processing: 10 246 358.4 125 3588
Waiting: 10 246 358.3 125 3587
Total: 10 246 358.4 125 3588
ERROR: The median and mean for the initial connection time are more than twice the standard deviation apart. These results are NOT reliable.
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 125
66% 290
75% 391
80% 426
90% 581
95% 743
98% 1078
99% 1506
100% 3588 (last request)
As you can see, the results are impressive. Whether everything will work so great for end users, or we are dealing with a typical example of fitting results in a laboratory, it is difficult to say. But you can try it yourself! Download the latest version from the developer’s website
(nanoweb.si.kz ) and install it at your place. Download, by the way, just nothing – about 250 kilobytes.
Oh, yes, another undeniably pleasant feature of the product is that it is cross–platform as much as PHP is cross-platform 🙂 That is, wherever PHP works, Nanoweb will also work. However, the developer warns that the performance under Windows will not be as good as under *nix, since PHP does not support process branching (forking) under Windows.
The installation is very simple – for *nix and Windows, installation scripts – install-sh and install are provided directly in the basic delivery.bat accordingly. Do not forget to look into the INSTALL file, from where you will learn such important information as the list of options with which your PHP should be assembled so that Nanoweb works normally on it.
Well, what to do next, you will learn from the documentation, which is both in the archive with Nanoweb, and on the manufacturer’s website.
