Follow-up: benchmarking Next.js server vs nginx at serving a static site, now on AWS

Adam Jones

Personally

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30 April 202430 April 2024

Yesterday, I published a benchmark that compared a few different ways of hosting a static Next.js site. I tested against a server running locally to focus as much as possible on the performance difference between the tools alone.

However, in the real world your servers are far away!

I wondered how this would affect the test results. My main assumption would be that it just adds some constant to all of them. But why not test, given I’ve got almost everything so easily set up for that now?

The first time I did this, I got very weird results. I realised this was because Next.js was just dropping a lot of the requests. I decreased the rate from 5000 to 100 to help it better cope with this.

Here are the results after making this change:

Median HTTP load times, high reqs/second (i.e. for the HTML response, using k6):

Median page load times, no additional reqs/second (i.e. for the browser to consider the page fully loaded, using Puppeteer):

Takeaways

At low load, moving to a remote server increases latency across the board. Surprisingly, Next.js actually starts to do slightly better than nginx: I’m not certain why this is the case. It could be various optimisations like their image optimisation (although I’m not certain this was enabled).

At higher load and measuring HTTP request times, nginx just takes the lead by a couple of milliseconds: but the difference is pretty small (note this is at much lower volumes than yesterday’s post).

This experiment also reinforced my belief that nginx is more of a pain to setup. Next.js ‘just worked’. I cloned the repo, did an npm install and things were happy. nginx required fiddling with the config file (I ended up using the absolute path rather than relative path with PWD to get it working), all the while being annoying to troubleshoot.

I think yesterday’s takeaway still holds: that in practice the performance penalty for picking Next.js over nginx is often worth the setup hassle.