Comparative Analysis of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint of Apache, Nginx, and Lighttpd Web Servers

The increased demand and diversity of web applications has brought a significant increase in the energy consumption and carbon footprint of web servers. However, no that many results have been published that study the web server energy consumption and identify which one is the most environmentally friendly. As a result, this study aims to compare the energy consumption and carbon footprint of three popular web servers, including Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd. To get insights into the energy consumption aspect multiple experiments are conducted to see how much energy web servers consume on different workloads. The research results demonstrated that Nginx and Lighttpd are the webservers that consume the less amount of energy compared to Apache. The reason of this result can be attributed to their asynchronous event-driven approach to handle a large number of simultaneous connections which allows Nginx and Lighttpd to use less resource and handle more requests with less overhead compared to the other web servers resulting to lower energy consumption and carbon footprint.