Powered by Lighttpd

Posted on 16 April 2008 in
linux lighttpd Drupal

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…

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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!