Why PHP7+Swoole Beats Nginx and Go in High‑Concurrency Benchmarks

Performance Comparison

Using ApacheBench, we benchmarked Nginx static pages, a Golang HTTP server, and a PHP7+Swoole HTTP server under 100 concurrent connections for 1,000,000 requests. PHP7+Swoole achieved about 75% higher QPS than Nginx and Golang.

Software      QPS
Nginx         164,489.92
Golang        166,838.68
PHP7+Swoole  287,104.12
Nginx‑1.9.9   245,058.70

Note: Nginx 1.9.9 was tuned with access_log disabled and open_file_cache enabled, reaching 245,058.70 QPS.

Test Environment

Hardware

CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-4590 @ 3.30 GHz × 4

Memory: 16 GB

Disk: 128 GB SSD

OS: Ubuntu 14.04 (Linux 3.16.0‑55‑generic)

Load Tool

ab -c 100 -n 1000000 -k http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Software Details

Nginx

Version

nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

VHOST Configuration

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    root /data/webroot;
    index index.html;
}

Test Page

<h1>Hello World!</h1>

Process Count

Nginx runs 4 worker processes.

Golang

Version

go version go1.5.2 linux/amd64

Test Code

package main
import (
    "log"
    "net/http"
    "runtime"
)
func main() {
    runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.NumCPU() - 1)
    http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        w.Header().Add("Last-Modified", "Thu, 18 Jun 2015 10:24:27 GMT")
        w.Header().Add("Accept-Ranges", "bytes")
        w.Header().Add("E-Tag", "55829c5b-17")
        w.Header().Add("Server", "golang-http-server")
        w.Write([]byte("<h1>
Hello world!
</h1>
"))
    })
    log.Printf("Go http Server listen on :8080")
    log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

PHP7+Swoole

PHP7 has OpCache enabled.

PHP Version

PHP 7.0.0 (cli) (built: Dec 10 2015 14:36:26) ( NTS )
Zend Engine v3.0.0
with Zend OPcache v7.0.6-dev

Swoole Version

swoole-1.7.22-alpha

PHP Extensions

[PHP Modules]
Core
ctype
curl
...
swoole
Zend OPcache
...
[Zend Modules]
Zend OPcache

Test Code

<?php
$http = new swoole_http_server("127.0.0.1", 9501, SWOOLE_BASE);
$http->set(['worker_num' => 4]);
$http->on('request', function ($request, swoole_http_response $response) {
    $response->header('Last-Modified', 'Thu, 18 Jun 2015 10:24:27 GMT');
    $response->header('E-Tag', '55829c5b-17');
    $response->header('Accept-Ranges', 'bytes');
    $response->end("<h1>
Hello Swoole.
</h1>");
});
$http->start();

Test Results

Nginx

Requests per second: 164,489.92
Time per request: 0.608 ms (mean)
...

Golang

Requests per second: 166,838.68
Time per request: 0.599 ms (mean)
...

PHP7+Swoole

Requests per second: 287,104.12
Time per request: 0.348 ms (mean)
...

Resource Consumption

Nginx

sar

16:31:05 all 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00
16:31:06 all 11.65 0.00 29.11 0.00 0.00 59.24
... (truncated)

vmstat

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ------cpu-----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa st
 0  0     0 3812080 559240 9321032   0    0     4    27   2   25  2  3 95  0  0
 ... (truncated)

Golang

sar

16:42:02 all 2.72 0.00 0.99 0.00 0.00 96.29
... (truncated)

vmstat

... (truncated)

PHP7+Swoole

sar

16:44:49 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
16:44:50 all 1.97 0.00 0.99 0.00 0.00 97.04
... (truncated)

vmstat

... (truncated)