Apache HTTP Server vs OpenResty

Overview

Apache HTTP Server

Stacks64.5K

Followers22.8K

Votes1.4K

GitHub Stars3.8K

Forks1.2K

OpenResty

Stacks2.3K

Followers227

Votes0

Apache HTTP Server vs OpenResty: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Apache HTTP Server and OpenResty

Apache HTTP Server and OpenResty are both popular web server software, but they have some key differences that set them apart.

Architecture: Apache HTTP Server follows a traditional multi-process, multi-threaded architecture, where each request is handled by a separate thread or process. On the other hand, OpenResty is based on the Nginx web server, which follows an event-driven, asynchronous architecture using a single-threaded event loop.
Extensions: Apache HTTP Server has a large number of modules and extensions available, which allows for more flexibility and customization. OpenResty, on the other hand, uses Lua as an embedded scripting language to extend its functionality. This allows developers to write custom logic directly in the configuration files, making it more suitable for certain use cases.
Performance: OpenResty is known for its high performance and scalability due to its event-driven architecture. It can handle a large number of concurrent connections with low resource usage, making it suitable for high-traffic websites. Apache HTTP Server, while still performant, may not be as efficient in handling large traffic loads.
Caching: Apache HTTP Server has built-in support for caching static content and can also be configured to work with popular caching solutions like Varnish. OpenResty, on the other hand, has its own caching mechanism called "lua_shared_dict," which allows developers to cache dynamic content efficiently.
SSL/TLS: Apache HTTP Server has extensive support for SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) protocols, including various encryption algorithms and features like client certificate authentication. OpenResty also supports SSL/TLS but may require additional configuration and customization.
Community and Ecosystem: Apache HTTP Server has a large and active community with a wide range of resources and documentation available. It also has a rich ecosystem of third-party modules and tools. OpenResty's community, while not as large as Apache's, is growing rapidly, and it also has a growing ecosystem of Lua modules and tools.

In Summary, Apache HTTP Server and OpenResty have different architectures, extensions, performance characteristics, caching mechanisms, SSL/TLS capabilities, and community/ecosystem support. These differences make them suitable for different use cases and scenarios.

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Advice on Apache HTTP Server, OpenResty

Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to

configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly.
Install apache and tomcat.
Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server.
Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports.
Create users on RHEL for application support team.
other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

419k views419k

Comments

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities.
Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k

Comments

Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided

Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.

429k views429k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apache HTTP Server	OpenResty
The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.	OpenResty (aka. ngx_openresty) is a full-fledged web application server by bundling the standard Nginx core, lots of 3rd-party Nginx modules, as well as most of their external dependencies.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 3.8K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.2K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 64.5K	Stacks 2.3K
Followers 22.8K	Followers 227
Votes 1.4K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 479 Web server 305 Most widely-used web server 217 Virtual hosting 148 Fast 138 Ssl support Cons 4 Hard to set up	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	NGINX

What are some alternatives to Apache HTTP Server, OpenResty?

NGINX

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Related Comparisons

Apache HTTP Server vs OpenResty: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Apache HTTP Server and OpenResty

Apache HTTP Server and OpenResty are both popular web server software, but they have some key differences that set them apart.

Architecture: Apache HTTP Server follows a traditional multi-process, multi-threaded architecture, where each request is handled by a separate thread or process. On the other hand, OpenResty is based on the Nginx web server, which follows an event-driven, asynchronous architecture using a single-threaded event loop.
Extensions: Apache HTTP Server has a large number of modules and extensions available, which allows for more flexibility and customization. OpenResty, on the other hand, uses Lua as an embedded scripting language to extend its functionality. This allows developers to write custom logic directly in the configuration files, making it more suitable for certain use cases.
Performance: OpenResty is known for its high performance and scalability due to its event-driven architecture. It can handle a large number of concurrent connections with low resource usage, making it suitable for high-traffic websites. Apache HTTP Server, while still performant, may not be as efficient in handling large traffic loads.
Caching: Apache HTTP Server has built-in support for caching static content and can also be configured to work with popular caching solutions like Varnish. OpenResty, on the other hand, has its own caching mechanism called "lua_shared_dict," which allows developers to cache dynamic content efficiently.
SSL/TLS: Apache HTTP Server has extensive support for SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) protocols, including various encryption algorithms and features like client certificate authentication. OpenResty also supports SSL/TLS but may require additional configuration and customization.
Community and Ecosystem: Apache HTTP Server has a large and active community with a wide range of resources and documentation available. It also has a rich ecosystem of third-party modules and tools. OpenResty's community, while not as large as Apache's, is growing rapidly, and it also has a growing ecosystem of Lua modules and tools.

Apache HTTP Server vs OpenResty

Overview

Apache HTTP Server vs OpenResty: What are the differences?