With more information in the continuing discussion about PHP and Apache 2, Ilia Alshanetsky has done some benchmarks just to check and see what kind of a performance difference there really is.

In response to the on going flame war pertaining to the stability and usability of Apache 2 in comparison to Apache 1 I've decided to conduct a series of benchmarks to try to determine exactly how the two Apaches compare. The purpose of the test was to determine which server is faster at serving static HTML pages, who's real-time compression implementation is better and of course which is more suited for running PHP applications. The full details of the test are available below, but here is a quick summary of the results.

• Apache 2 is about 4% faster then Apache 1 at serving static pages.
• Apache 2's mod_deflate is over 60 percent faster then Apache 1's mod_gzip at real time compression of static HTML pages.
• Serving PHP via Apache 2 is 27 percent slower then via Apache 1 DSO and 31 percent slower then Apache 1 static.

There's more to the story than just that, however - but you'll have to read on for that...