Al Hoang

Nice summary of his talk at FOWA 2008.

Confirmation of Matt speaking at FOWA 2008 and link to a mp3 speech. I like how he talks about scaling on multiple levels for a website.

While going through my blog feeds I came across a post on Ubuntu Geek on lighttpd with php5 and mysql support. One choice quote from the article sort of irked me as I was scanning through it:

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.

While I can agree with the author’s assessments on lighttpd serving static files, I’m still not 100% convinced it is the end-all be all solution once you throw in FastCGI + PHP5 in the backend. In general, it’s a no-brainer that you should not be using Apache if you need performance AND are serving static files. You are far better served by using nginx or lighttpd or probably any of the new generation of lighter-weight web servers out there.

However, the game changes when you toss in backend FastCGI processes and MOST of the handling of the website is dynamic content generation by the PHP backend without that many static files. Why do I say this? I’ve converted over an Apache 2 setup with mod_php5 to lighttpd with FastCGI and have been monitoring it stats for awhile and a few things that sort of surprised me was:

• CPU usage hasn’t changed that much
• The memory consumption systemwise also doesn’t seem to be that much different
• Load averages overall seem a little bit higher

However, there are probably many flaws with my observations since this is a live running system that I’m very loathe to apply scientific measurement since this could easily produce downtime on a system I’d rather not take down. Overall, I have been a little disappointed that switching to lighttpd + fastcgi hasn’t really done much to drop the system resources as much as I hoped.

My guess right now is that since a lot of the work has to be handled by the FastCGI backends which is PHP, switching to lighttpd hasn’t really been that much of a gain since in the end most of the handling on that server is being done by PHP with lighttpd merely fronting it so lighttpd might be light indeed but the FastCGI PHP processes aren’t. I guess this goes to show you that one should not always dogmatically believe the hype.