Performance and Resource Efficiency

Handling I/O

Resource consumption and speed are two significant factors when we’re writing servers that must deal with thousands of requests per second.

For such resource-critical projects, its important that the base tools, the primitives, have an architecture that accounts for this. When the time to scale arises, it helps that the fundamental decisions we made at the beginning support that.

Web servers are one of those cases. The web is a significant platform in today’s world. It never stops growing, with more devices and new tools accessing the internet daily, making it accessible to more people. The web is the common, democratized, decentralized ground for people worldwide. With this in mind, the servers behind those applications and websites must handle giant loads. Web applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, among many others, deal with thousands of requests per minute. So, scale is essential.

To kickstart a conversation about performance and resource efficiency, let’s look at the following graph, which compares two of the most used open-source web servers: Apache and Nginx: