# Anyone have experience with Cherokee web server ?



## eva2000 (Aug 23, 2013)

Anyone here have any experience with Cherokee web server http://cherokee-project.com/ ? As well as Nginx web server ? 

One of my Centmin Mod users suggests I look at Cherokee web server and he said he did benchmarks against simple phpinfo php file and it was faster than Nginx and Litespeed web server ?

I see Cherokee mentions a front line cache feature http://cherokee-project.com/doc/other_front_line_cache.html is that what is accelerating Cherokee for simple phpinfo php file benchmarks ?

Right now I have a test CentOS 6.4 64bit server setup with Centmin Mod Nginx web server + OpenLiteSpeed web server + Cherokee web servers for testing. But Cherokee pretty foreign to me, so wondering if any Cherokee users have some tips to get me in the right direction for benchmark comparisons ?

cheers


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## Tux (Aug 23, 2013)

Cherokee is interesting. It does have a web GUI. However, it's not really often used, and a lot of users would prefer nginx for its heavy flexibility.


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## drmike (Aug 23, 2013)

I'm real familiar with Cherokee 

Last check the project was idle on development and releases were lagging or stopped.

It has an AWESOME web based GUI for setup.  Best I've seen for any web server.

Speed wise, Cherokee is capable.   If you poke around on their website there are performance tests.  Old, but probably inclusive of details on testing methods / software used / specs of server / etc.


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## drmike (Aug 23, 2013)

Here:

http://www.rootusers.com/web-server-performance-benchmark/


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## eva2000 (Aug 24, 2013)

buffalooed said:


> I'm real familiar with Cherokee
> 
> Last check the project was idle on development and releases were lagging or stopped.
> 
> ...


Great a more experienced eye to check my results then 

Yes Cherokee seems to have a very good web gui.

What i set out to do some quick benchmarks turned into a mini essay LOL.

Update my benchmark page http://centminmod.com/benchmarks.html with Nginx vs OpenLiteSpeed vs Cherokee PHP benchmarks http://centminmod.com/benchmarks_nginx_openlitespeed_cherokee.html


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## MannDude (Aug 24, 2013)

I ran it on a dev-VPS maybe a year ago. Installed WordPress, played around, said to myself, "This is neat" and then haven't returned.

It's neat.


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## GIANT_CRAB (Aug 24, 2013)

I used it a year ago.

It was pretty cool but had some bugs.

Issue response on Github was slow when I reported the bugs.

Octality is the enterprise version of Cherokee but I'm not sure where it went to.

Octality was probably abandoned a few months ago.

Now Cherokee is full of unfixed bugs - https://github.com/cherokee/webserver/issues

The most active developer would be https://github.com/Borkason


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## drmike (Aug 24, 2013)

GIANT_CRAB said:


> Octality is the enterprise version of Cherokee but I'm not sure where it went to.
> 
> Octality was probably abandoned a few months ago.


Octality was a high performance web consultancy.  Couple of guys mainly in Spain. Cherokee spun out of there and was used for clients originally.

Alvaro, the main author, went off to work for a big tech company.  When that happened activity tapered off very quick.  There was lots of development and activity for a number of years.

Anything related to caching is slightly problematic and perhaps not entirely complete.  I say that because much of the caching was grafted on towards the end.



eva2000 said:


> What i set out to do some quick benchmarks turned into a mini essay LOL.
> 
> Update my benchmark page http://centminmod.com/benchmarks.html with Nginx vs OpenLiteSpeed vs Cherokee PHP benchmarks http://centminmod.com/benchmarks_nginx_openlitespeed_cherokee.html


Holy cow!  I glanced your write up.   I haven't mucked with Cherokee in eons to offer much there.  Nifty write up.

There were lots of fastest spats. Reoccurring issue.

If you have totally cachable content, shove it in Varnish or Nginx.  Hard to beat either running full cache out of RAM.

Anything hitting PHP for content gets into all sorts optimization and tweaks.  I know there were tons of tickets/issues relating to how PHP was handled.  I don't believe Cherokee was anywhere nearly as efficient as it should have been there.

If you had spare cycles to burn, I'd try running some tests with pure static content and get numbers and then do more tests that introduce various points of contention --- PHP namely or any other app server.  I'd also try running them where everything is cached across all the webservers.  Try it once with hot pre-ran server and once from cold empty one.

One thing I did not in the Cherokee stuff you ran was the range on the request times.  Cherokee is like that.  Common to see longer running stragglers when bulk benching requests.  I don't know why that is.   Always was a question and point of umm, annoyance.


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## eva2000 (Aug 24, 2013)

Cheers guys for more background info surrounding Cherokee development. I started checking out their mailing lists and seem to be a ghost town in many.

buffalooed, thanks. Yeah request times I usually also look at the longest transaction times as well. It was meant to be a quick write up and ended up being longer than anticipated  :lol:

Yeah static file tests would be interesting as well


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## rm_ (Aug 24, 2013)

I tried Cherokee briefly, but then it changed the config file format to some insane human-unreadable one, and insisted that from now on you are supposed to configure the server *via the web-interface*, and direct editing of configs is no longer supported and is discouraged. Moved to Lighttpd and never looked back since.


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## drmike (Aug 24, 2013)

@rm_ you snuck in before the super web admin was added.  That change pissed a bunch of people off, obviously.

I started using it after that point.

It's definitely worth eyeballing Cherokee today even.

I wouldn't put it in production unless personal site or something.  It works, but who knows about fixes if you need them.

GoPro Cameras -- those action cameras --- they use Cherokee in their Bak wireless solution for the 2 & 3 model cameras.


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