Not sure why you're getting negged here; using nginx without Varnish, you're not going to get nearly the speed, and using Vanish on Apache just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Not sure what you mean by "has some performance penalty compared to Varnish" however.
Nginx "has some performance penalty compared to Varnish"
The performance penalty comes the number of system calls needed to complete the request. According to the Varnish arch docs, it's 18 syscalls (http://varnish-cache.org/wiki/ArchitectNotes). Also, Varnish doesn't malloc for each new request/header. It mallocs once per workspace.
Unfortunately there's no such thing as Nginx vs Varnish benchmarks because Varnish is just a cache (apple to orange comparison).
Header manip is very important if one needs to control caching. I'm not sure Nginx has this capability at such granular level. Varnish's VCL excels at this.
As explained above, all info has been disclosed on the page in question. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with the results. Let's face it, benchmarks are always going to be controversial and imperfect. One should always take the initiative to verify results by running their own tests.
Nginx does have that capability on a much more granular level in fact.
That benchmark was entirely useless for all the points I mentioned in the other post, but predominantly because you saturated your network on one of those tests, which meant the bottleneck was the network and not the webserver.
All your counterpoints were ignorant/naive and just went to show me how much you don't understand what is going on.
This wouldn't be a bad thing in itself, everyone has to start somewhere, but to think you do this for a living...
Let me clear up a few things. Again, the point of the experiment is not to setup the perfect environment for either VM but to subject both Web servers to fair and equal conditions. Whether it is 1GB RAM, 100Mbps switch ports, stock configurations, etc. It's fair game.
Now, I don't know if you have experience in the Web hosting business but perfection is not and never will be the goal. Clients could care less about the back-end or details as long as the response they get at the browser is acceptable. That's what drives our efforts in technology.
You keep on repeating the idea that no one needs both Varnish and Nginx in their design. Again, there's benefit in running such configuration. It's practical, effective, and thankfully keeps the business flowing. Here's an example of a successful business, besides us ;), doing it: http://www.heroku.com. If you don't realize the benefits of running Varnish over Nginx or Nginx over Varnish in certain situations, that would be one stubborn opinion. So please, stop my wasting my time.
> You keep on repeating the idea that no one needs both Varnish and Nginx in their design.
I never said that at any point.
What I did say was your reasoning that Varnish is faster than Nginx is flawed:
Apache+Varnish is 97% faster than Litespeed [1]
Litespeed is faster than Nginx [2]
*therefore I infer* Varnish is faster than Nginx.
Those cited benchmarks are both crap, and if they are relevant to a particular setup (ie yours), then you cannot use them on a public forum as proof that one is faster than the other.
You see, the problem I have is that you're spreading FUD which many will read and believe (as you do).
Not sure what you mean by "has some performance penalty compared to Varnish" however.