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Lighttpd vs thttpd

I manage a forums site that utitlizes RRDNS to load balance several webservers to a single db server. The site serves a lot of images, so to tweak performance even further I wanted to try to move the images off on to a lightning fast file-only server (no PHP on minimal file transfer services). Its amazing how much faster a small footprint server can be. An optimized Apache2 process with only PHP and a handful of other modules compiled in is still 6-8MB. Running 300 of those at a time is a hog.

After some searching, I came of with these potentials:

After a quick look at both packages, thttpd seems to be more lightweight, which is just what I am after. lighttpd is definitely more full featured, it even supports a dozen or so Apache-style modules like vhosts, httpd authentication, Ruby and even PHP. On this project I don’t see the need for the majority of these so hopefully thttpd will be my baby. I’m going to try it out first and see.

More later…

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Posted in SysAdmin.


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Continuing the Discussion

  1. damonparker.org - Lighttpd Update linked to this post on 9/27/2005

    [...] I have written several times about this lighttpd install. I had to check something on the server last night so I popped over to the server-stats page to see what kind of throughput it was pushing. [...]

  2. Lighttpd vs thttpd Update3 - damonparker.org linked to this post on 8/7/2007

    [...] have been asked several times recently about my original comparison of Lighttpd and thttpd and subsequent benchmarks for Lighttpd vs [...]



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