Rails with Zeus and Mongrel or FCGI

Because Mark asked in the comments on my last post, and we happen to have a licensed Zeus install on the same exact “server” machine, I thought I’d try out Zeus in the same quick tests.

Zeus gateway proxy to Mongrel


$ ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://private.zeus.textdrive.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.121.2.12 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Server Software: Zeus/4_3
Server Hostname: private.zeus.textdrive.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 11047 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 39.882327 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 11202009 bytes
HTML transferred: 11060445 bytes
Requests per second: 25.07 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 398.823 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 39.882 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 274.28 [Kbytes/sec] received

Zeus hitting FCGI


$ ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://private.zeus.textdrive.com/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.121.2.12 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Server Software: Zeus/4_3
Server Hostname: private.zeus.textdrive.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /
Document Length: 11047 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 13.396761 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 11190000 bytes
HTML transferred: 11047000 bytes
Requests per second: 74.64 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 133.968 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 13.397 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 815.64 [Kbytes/sec] received

Zeus on a static file at a concurrency of 200 (like Litespeed below)


$ ab -n 10000 -c 200 http://zeus.textdrive.com/icons/f_file_tar.gif
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.121.2.12 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Server Software: Zeus/4_3
Server Hostname: zeus.textdrive.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /icons/f_file_tar.gif
Document Length: 2752 bytes

Concurrency Level: 200
Time taken for tests: 7.283246 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 29626192 bytes
HTML transferred: 27544320 bytes
Requests per second: 1373.01 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 145.665 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.728 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3972.27 [Kbytes/sec] received

You can still see it yourself

http://zeus.textdrive.com/
$ curl -I http://zeus.textdrive.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Zeus/4_3
Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 05:08:45 GMT
Content-Length: 11047
Content-Type: text/html

Please don’t run ‘ab’ against it. That’s Zeus -> Mongrel

So??

Yes it appears that Zeus -> mongrel and Zeus -> FCGI are slower than the same setup with Lighttpd and Litespeed.

Now you do it on static files? Then Zeus is clearly faster than (I mean it was doing 1700-2000 req/sec with concurrencies of 200-500 no problemo.

I think I’ll tell a story about FCGI on Alistapart next.

·:· Posted 19 February 2006, 04:13 by Jason Hoffman to Web servers  |  

  1. Interesting. Thanks for running this test setup Jason. Zeus got slaughtered, especially on the proxy setup to mongrel.

    This is on FreeBSD, right? Ages ago I used to run some big traffic under Zeus on FreeBSD but over time FreeBSD seemed to fall out of favour with Zeus customers (and hence Zeus themselves). I know we ended up switching to Linux on the front end boxes that needed the CPU power and stuck with Solaris/Sparc on the the less stressed infrastructure. I have no idea if Zeus ever switched to kqueue, although it’s unlikely that would be a factor in the proxy/fcgi performance anyways.

    I’ll be curious to see your Solaris shootout! :)

    — Mark Mayo    19 February 2006, 07:56    #
  2. Yes this one is FreeBSD 5. Got the same on Solaris x86.

    — jason Hoffman    19 February 2006, 08:09    #