NGINX on AmpereOne Workload Brief

NGINX is an open source, high performance HTTP server and reverse proxy with many other web service-related features bundled. It is often used as load balancer in the cloud. NGINX implements an event-driven architecture to handle incoming requests. It is built to offer a low memory footprint and high concurrency. NGINX is the most popular web server among high-traffic websites as of 2024, according to W3Techs.

As can be seen in figure 1, up to 28% performance improvement was observed with the AmpereOne® A192-32X processor compared to the AMD EPYC 9654, and 8% compared to the AMD EPYC 9754, all under a 95th percentile latency Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 10 milliseconds.

Figure 2 shows the energy efficiency of the three processors running NGINX. The AmpereOne® A192-32X had a 39% better performance/Watt compared to the AMD EPYC 9654, and 17% better than the AMD EPYC 9754.

The popular open-source http benchmarking tool, wrk (v4.10), was used as the load generator. Wrk running on the client system generated requests over HTTPS connections to the NGINX daemon running on the system under test (SUT). The test was configured to run with multiple threads and connections and the same client system was used as load generator across all the platforms.

On the server side, NGINX version 1.15.4 was configured to serve a 50 KB static HTML file over HTTPS using the Brotli algorithm for compression (quality 5). Server-side LuaJIT was used to process the incoming request URL for regular expressions. NGINX was compiled with the HTTP SSL, openssl, brotli, and nginx-lua modules.

Wrk was configured to run with 96 clients and connections increasing from 100 to 500 in steps of 100 to observe the impact on throughput and p99 latency. Each test was run for 120 seconds and repeated three times, while recording the average throughput and p99 latencies. Minimal run-to-run variation in throughput and p99 latencies was observed.

For large-scale cloud deployments, performance/watt (energy efficiency) is an important metric in addition to performance. The AmpereOne® A192-32X Cloud Native Processors couple performance leadership with a significant performance/watt advantage as shown in this performance brief, resulting in up to 39% higher energy efficiency.

NGINX is one of the most popular web servers in the cloud today. It scales well with the compute resources that the AmpereOne® family of processors offers. The AmpereOne® A192-32X is designed to deliver exceptional performance and energy efficiency for cloud native applications.

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System configurations, components, software versions, and testing environments that differ from those used in Ampere’s tests may result in different measurements than those obtained by Ampere.

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