Results of running Lighttpd as a static file server for Drupal 6
In my blog post Running Lighttpd as a static file server for Drupal 6 on a Debian GNU/Linux server I describe how I set up a static file server here on xdeb.org. I mentioned there that I have not done any benchmarking on the improvements. I still haven’t, but I found some interesting information on Google webmaster tools.
I use Google webmaster tools to submit my sitemaps. One or two times a year I go there to see if everything is in order. They have done some updates since I was there last and this time I found “Crawl stats” under “Diagnostics” (they may very well have been there for a long time but i found them now).
The image show the chart for “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)”. Notice the big drop in late July. That’s when I implemented Lighttpd as static file server.
The average time Google spent on downloading a page went from well over 1000 ms to around 600 ms. I’m very pleased with that result.
When talking about performance and web sites there is really two separate issues. The first is how many requests a site can handle (backend performance), the other is page loading speed (front-end performance).
For a small site like xdeb.org the first is normally not a problem. The page loading speed on the other hand is as important for a personal blog as for a big site.
A static file server will help with both aspects of performance but the big win is page loading speed as shown with the Google webmaster tools example above.
If you want to handle some serious number of requests you have memcache and varnish. If you want to improve page loading speed on a small server or VPS with limited amount of RAM etc. a static file server is a good option.
Comments
Using Lighty to run a static
Using Lighty to run a static file server is good, but why not use it to run Drupal itself as well? Nginx is another good choice in the world of lightweight web servers - I'm not sure why so many people stick with the bloated mess that is Apache when there are better alternatives out there. Check out these groups on GDO: http://groups.drupal.org/lighttpd http://groups.drupal.org/nginx
Nginx
I would recommend using Nginx over lighttpd, but that's just my opinion.
How about Apache threaded (MPM Worker)?
How about Apache threaded (MPM Worker)?
It is lean and barely uses any significant memory.
Did you try that?
I have read your article
I have read your article about Apache with fcgid and it’s very interesting (as you articles tend to be).
I have read about Nginx as well and it sounds nice. When I get time, or have a pressing need, I will check out both solutions.
Apache with mod_php is a memory hog but it’s a stable and trouble free in other respects. I have found the same to be true of PHP APC and Lighttpd as a static file server. It just works.
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