This blog is now no longer powered by Apache (the feature filled but slightly bloated beast), instead I have decided to give Lighttpd (pronounced Lighty) a whirl.
What convinced me? Ages ago I read an article by Dries Buytaert comparing webserver configurations. It was shocked to see that Lighttpd appeared to be able to serve almost twice as many pages per second as Apache. There is also the advantage that a static file will only cost you substantially less memory to serve in Lighty than it will in Apache due to Apache bundling ALL the mods into every process.
So what is Lighttpd? The inventors describe it perfectly…
Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility -- all of these describe lighttpd (pron. Lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.
The effect so far is amazing! The server's memory footprint is WAY down. Apache used to use around 7-8Mb per process. The single Lighty process is currently using 1.3Mb and each PHP-FastCGI child thats spawned is between 1.5Mb and 2.4Mb. Currently the total is a mere 15Mb whereas Apache, currently would have been eating anywhere between 70Mb and 90Mb!
I will be posting more articles over the coming days about how I got it up and running on here. I would also appreciate any comments from readers about their experiences with it in case they can help me or any other readers!
it does load faster
so i'm thinking you have your own server? i'm wondering if we could do the switch with MediaTemple's Dedicated virtual servers or fully dedicated servers?
Also check out Nginx
I've been using Nginx for some time now and it's
another very lean and very fast Apache replacement
that is similar to Lighttpd.
In my experience it's much easier to configure than
Lighttpd and already has an impressive number of
add-on modules.
http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main
Yup
My server is a VPS hosted with a company in the UK called A2B2. I'm paying about £30 a month for 1Gb RAM, several hundred gigs of "fair share" 100Mb bandwidth, 20Gb Hard disk and root access to my VPS so I can install whatever the hell I want (except game servers and BitTorrent servers).
Nginx you say
I have heard of this but not had a chance to look into it yet.
I have personally found Lighttpd VERY easy to configure... Its far more "programmatic" in configuration than Apache.
MPM's
FWIW, the "Apache sucks - Lighthttpd rocks" discussion is usually based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apache works.
Apache has pluggable backends including several threaded ones - worker, event, etc. And the old-school prefork one. Due to some history and a whole lot of FUD, the default configuration for Apache is usally prefork.
Configuring Apache with a threaded MPM - like Lighthttpd - and stripping away all of its features/loaded modules - like Lighthttpd - will result in performance that's like Lighthttpd.
Not that one is far/better or worse than the other, but it's only fair to compare apples to apples before making assertions ;)
Ah interesting!
I did not know Apache could do this. I'll have to research the MPM/Prefork stuff. I always wondered what those bits were for...