TextDrive loves lighttpd

David has gone and said it, the reign of Apache has finally ended

Why lighttpd?

  • Small memory footprint.
  • Scaleability (comment/link/refer spammers have exposed to us the hog that is Apache, more than “slashdot” ever has—but don’t get me wrong, I still love you Apache, I do, you’re just fat and a bit too slow).
  • Solid, solid, solid FastCGI support (also has issues in Apache when you get near phantom file descriptor limits).
  • A seeming interest in virtual hosting in MySQL (there is a module for it).
  • Conditionals with regex support.

In short, faster and happier sites even when under load.

We ourselves run our weblog (Textpattern 1.0 with clean URLs), forum, manuals and trac (this last one is cool, it’s lighttpd proxying to daemonized Trac—tracd).

Clean urls (thanks to the lighttpd list) in textpattern turned out to be a simple config:

server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php"

For our hosting clients, people are running their own instance of lighttpd like how one runs instiki (on a port and from their home directory; some adventurous ones tried it and I got some excited emails quite soon after that weblog post), some others are virtual hosted from the same install (that’s one PHP and one Rails app). And then because of scale/traffic/load issues, we’re moving Wordpress’s Codex under it this weekend.

There’s even SSL in there, and then some dedicated apps on dedicated servers that are jumping on lighttpd with gusto. In fact, when people come to me and say that they need “3 web servers, 2 app servers and a database server”, the first thing that comes out of my mouth is “OK, and we’ll try it under lighttpd first. Believe me, you’ll love it.”

So what does the future hold? We’ll have to see. Next is traffic shaping and using conditionals to do many of the same things we do with mod_security.

What would I like to see still (and would even happily pay for … speaking of which, the community needs to figure out how to make sure lighttpd stays around)?

  • Solid and complete virtual hosting of PHP and Rails apps in MySQL (move all that config into mysql).
  • A flexible mod_auth_mysql
  • A mod_log_mysql

Because, see …, well …, that would make an interface and stats app (say in something like Rails or heaven forbid, PHP) so so easy.

·:· Posted 26 February 2005, 19:05 by Jason Hoffman to Lighttpd  |  

  1. Could this become one of the supported TextDrive packages, so that sign-ups from the lighttpd site receive some money as with Rails et al?

    — dwlt    2 March 2005, 10:55    #