I have an Angular website with static assets of around 1.5 mb and gzipped it is around 400 kb, I have nginx as my webserver & reverse proxy to the API server, when I test nginx with Apache benchmark tool, I find huge drop in performance if I test the https site compared to the http (https is 10 times slower) & the cpu utilization & memory is not high at all (cpu 30% memory is only 1 mb!!)

I have been searching for hours & tried all possible enhancements but none worked, as far as I have read https shall not be that much slower on modern web servers (http around 1500 req/sec & https is 46 req/sec for nginx), this is mostly from the Nginx https very high connect time but I have no clue how to solve this.

Can someone advise how to improve this?

(Also to my surprise, Apache performs much better in both cases but doesn't respond if I set concurrent connections to more than 200) & this is not nginx vs apache I am just stating my situation.

Important note:

I am not comparing the 2 web servers that is not the point of this site, but generally they have comparable performance so if https in nginx is 10 times slower than Apache I feel that something is wrong in my Nginx configuration & I want to fix it.

All test are on my windows machine i7 & 16 gb ram.

Nginx http only:

C:\Apache24\bin>ab -n 5000 -c 200 http://localhost:8100/abc/index.html?param=abc This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1826891 $> Server Software: nginx/1.15.4 Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 8100 Document Path: /abc/index.html?param=abc Document Length: 1099 bytes Concurrency Level: 200 Time taken for tests: 3.246 seconds Complete requests: 5000 Failed requests: 0 Total transferred: 6665000 bytes HTML transferred: 5495000 bytes Requests per second: 1540.32 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 129.843 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.649 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 2005.12 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 0 1.3 0 16 Processing: 31 87 12.8 94 124 Waiting: 0 87 13.7 94 124 Total: 31 87 12.8 94 124 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 94 66% 94 75% 94 80% 94 90% 99 95% 109 98% 109 99% 113 100% 124 (longest request) 

Nginx https (with http2 enabled)

C:\Apache24\bin>abs -n 5000 -c 200 https://localhost:8200/abc/index.html?param=abc This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1826891 $> Server Software: nginx/1.15.4 Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 8200 SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,2048,256 TLS Server Name: localhost Document Path: /abc/index.html?param=abc Document Length: 1099 bytes Concurrency Level: 200 Time taken for tests: 108.985 seconds Complete requests: 5000 Failed requests: 0 Total transferred: 6780000 bytes HTML transferred: 5495000 bytes Requests per second: 45.88 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 4359.386 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 21.797 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 60.75 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 16 4201 506.8 4251 4755 Processing: 0 32 12.6 31 88 Waiting: 0 32 12.6 31 88 Total: 62 4232 506.9 4283 4800 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 4283 66% 4342 75% 4413 80% 4439 90% 4484 95% 4547 98% 4694 99% 4727 100% 4800 (longest request) 

Compared to Apache http (here CPU is around 90 to 100% utilized)

C:\Apache24\bin>ab -n 5000 -c 200 http://localhost:6200/abc/index.html?param=abc Server Software: Apache/2.4.33 Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 6200 Document Path: /abc/index.html?param=abc Document Length: 1099 bytes Concurrency Level: 200 Time taken for tests: 1.781 seconds Complete requests: 5000 Failed requests: 0 Total transferred: 6810000 bytes HTML transferred: 5495000 bytes Requests per second: 2806.99 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 71.251 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.356 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 3733.51 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 0 1.6 0 16 Processing: 16 69 16.0 63 125 Waiting: 0 57 16.0 63 125 Total: 16 69 16.0 63 125 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 63 66% 78 75% 78 80% 78 90% 94 95% 94 98% 94 99% 109 100% 125 (longest request) 

And Apache https is as follows (http 1.1) & note that http 1.1 in nginx didn't improve its performance:

C:\Apache24\bin>abs -n 5000 -c 200 https://localhost:7200/abc/index.html?param=abc This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1826891 $> Server Software: Apache/2.4.33 Server Hostname: localhost Server Port: 7200 SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,2048,256 TLS Server Name: localhost Document Path: /abc/index.html?param=abc Document Length: 1099 bytes Concurrency Level: 200 Time taken for tests: 8.747 seconds Complete requests: 5000 Failed requests: 0 Total transferred: 6810000 bytes HTML transferred: 5495000 bytes Requests per second: 571.60 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 349.894 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 1.749 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 760.27 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 198 42.7 188 391 Processing: 62 145 39.1 140 385 Waiting: 0 76 28.3 78 250 Total: 62 343 63.0 331 615 Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms) 50% 331 66% 369 75% 380 80% 389 90% 422 95% 465 98% 500 99% 536 100% 615 (longest request) 

My nginx configuration:

worker_processes auto; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; sendfile on; keepalive_timeout 65; server { listen 8100; server_name localhost; location / { root html; index index.html index.htm; } #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root html; } } server { listen 8200 ssl http2; server_name localhost; ssl_certificate C:/nginx-1.13.12/conf/server.crt; ssl_certificate_key C:/nginx-1.13.12/conf/server.key; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; ssl_session_timeout 10m; ssl_ciphers HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; gzip on; gzip_comp_level 1; gzip_vary on; gzip_types text/css text/javascript text/xml text/plain text/x-component application/javascript application/json application/xml application/rss+xml font/truetype font/opentype application/vnd.ms-fontobject image/svg+xml; gzip_static on; location /ipo_reits/ { root html; index index.html index.htm; ## here we redirect to the homepage in case of nginx 404 try_files $uri $uri/ /ipo_reits/index.html; # error_page 404 =301 /; } location /api/ { proxy_pass https://localhost:7001/; } } }