With the help of the great guys at Slicehost.com, I am attempting to run my benchmark series on a virtual private server, to compare with EC2. However, I'm seeing a very strange result for the baselines: a PHP page delivers more requests-per-second than a static HTML page.

The OS is a stock Ubuntu 8.10 installation; you can see the setup steps here.

The virtual private server has 2 gigs of RAM, and is on a box by itself, so there is no other external activity to skew the results.

I ran ab -c 10 -t 60 http://localhost/ on each of two files: index.html, which has only the static text "hello world"; and index.php, which has only the code <?php echo 'hello world'; ?>.

Here are the results without APC, averaged over 5 one-minute runs:


index.html : 7067.57 req/sec
index.php  : 7484.57 req/sec # faster???

Here are the results with APC, averaged over 5 one-minute runs:


index.html : 7013.50 req/sec
index.php  : 8041.06 req/sec # faster???

I haven't seen this behavior on EC2. I'm not complaining, but it does seem unintuitive; invoking the PHP interpreter should be more expensive than just delivering a static HTML file. Does anyone have ideas as to why this might be happening?

UPDATE: With the help of Paul Reinheimer, we appear to have found the culprit: the ab tool itself seems to be at fault. Running similar tests by hand with siege returns much more reasonable and expected numbers (~4000 req/sec for HTML, ~3200 for PHP). I'm going to re-work the test scripts to use siege later and report back. Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions, and special thanks to Paul Reinheimer for working through it with me today.

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