Web servers
All the NAS tested integrate a web server, generally Apache, which at least manages the machines configuration tool Qnap and Synology go even further and provide the hosting of your own dynamic sites in PHP/MySQL : blogs, forums, Intranet site, personal site web page, etc.
Here are the installed applications:
In order to have an idea of the performances of NAS as a web hosting platform, we outfitted ourselves with two scripts:
– the «
Free PHP Benchmark Script » from the site Free Web Hosting measures the execution time of a group of mathematical functions in PHP ;
– With a script of our making, we simply measured the execution time of the following SQL request: « BENCHMARK(1000000,encode("bonjour","au revoir")) ».
Of course, these scripts do not in any way enable us to carry out an extensive test of server performances (there are special applications for this), but this was not our goal.
As a reference, we have included the results obtained with a PC equipped with a P4 at 2.4 GHz/2 GB DDR, in Windows XP and with Wamp 2.0. This was in conditions that were far from those usually found in the test lab because this is the PC which we use to write this article (numerous programs open at the same time, no particular optimization, etc.). But once again, the goal was simply to have a reference to compare the results obtained with NAS.
As we thought, NAS performances are very far from those of the PC’s and more surprisingly are very different from one another. The SQL request was three times as slow with Qnap but the execution of PHP code was twice as fast.
How do we interpret these results and what do they mean in practice? To have a better idea, we installed a web site with a PHPBB 2.0 forum of reasonable size (2000 members, 90,000 messages). The conclusion is that the Qnap does the best. Navigation in pages isn’t instantaneous and is preceded by a small delay, but this is noticeably shorter than that of the Synology. Of course, this essentially depends on the distribution of the load of MySQL requests and PHP code, but this behavior should nevertheless be quite representative.
In addition, Qnap offers the possibility of editing the PHP.ini file in the configuration interface. With Synology, you must activate the Telnet/SSH connection and then connect to the command line interface, in order to access the same file.
