NGINX vs Apache Tomcat vs Lwan | What are the differences?

Overview

NGINX

Stacks114.7K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Apache Tomcat

Stacks16.8K

Followers12.6K

Votes201

GitHub Stars8.0K

Forks5.3K

Lwan

Stacks1

Followers6

Votes4

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks551

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Advice on NGINX, Apache Tomcat, Lwan

Daniel

Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development

May 25, 2021

Decided

For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.

We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.

We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.

289k views289k

Comments

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

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	Apache Tomcat	Lwan
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.	Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.	In development for almost 3 years, Lwan was until now a personal research effort that focused mostly on building a solid infrastructure for a lightweight and speedy web server.
-	-	Low memory footprint (~500KiB for 10k idle connections);Minimal memory allocations & copies;Minimal system calls;Hand-crafted HTTP request parser;Static file serving uses the most efficient way according to file size;No copies between kernel and userland for files larger than 16KiB;Smaller files are sent using vectored I/O;Header overhead is considered before considering deflate compression;Mostly wait-free multi-threaded design;One thread accepts connections, one I/O thread per logical CPU handles them;Hand-crafted coroutines makes asynchronous I/O a breeze in C;Linux only, as it relies on epoll();Purpose-built I/O loop;Efficient loading cache used for;Directory listing;File information (size, last modified date, MIME type, etc);Compressed files;Diminute codebase with roughly 7200 lines of C code
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars 8.0K	GitHub Stars 6.0K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 5.3K	GitHub Forks 551
Stacks 114.7K	Stacks 16.8K	Stacks 1
Followers 61.9K	Followers 12.6K	Followers 6
Votes 5.5K	Votes 201	Votes 4
Pros & Cons
Pros 1452 High-performance http server 894 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	Pros 79 Easy 72 Java 49 Popular 1 Spring web Cons 3 Blocking - each http request block a thread 2 Easy to set up	Pros 1 Performance 1 High-performance http server 1 Free 1 C and Lua Scripting

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Apache Tomcat, Lwan?

Apache HTTP Server

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.

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.

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.