Preliminary benchmarks results are in. I had some problems getting OpenLoad to run the full test on lighttpd, so the only conclusive numbers I got were for apache2/mod_php4 with and without eAccelerator.
Test setup:
P4 2.8ghz, 1g ram
apache 2.0.52
mod_php 4.3.10 (64 megs memory_limit, test scripts are fairly small and this limit didn't seem to affect results)
I was testing:
eAccelerator 0.9.2a
The test script was a NuSOAP client connecting to a local NuSOAP server. The server function was running a few mysql queries and returning a short string. When I tried to test with lighttpd, openload would not return any results from the client. To run some more useful tests with lighttpd I need a benchmarking tool that I can use to send the SOAP request. Maybe time to bash together some curl fork()ing?
The results:
Transactions Per Second (Higher is better):
Average Response Time (Lower is better):
Max. Response Time (Lower is better, unless you like waiting):