Mar
Choosing the right web server backend for the Octabox service was not as straightforward as it has been for me in previous endeavors.
The demands of a large scale web-application are so very different from a those of a simpler page-serving site.
In the end the choices came down to two:
Apache httpd (latest ver. 2.2.4) - Old faithful. Apache has served me exclusively thus far, it has great support, it’s very stable and its performance is certainly up there with the best of them.
Lighttpd (latest ver. 1.5.0 Pre-release, 1.4.13 Stable) - A lightweight alternative. Lighttpd (pronounced Lighty) claims to outperform its heavier counterpart.
In a nutshell, Lighttpd appears to have better support for Asynchronous transactions (aka AJAX) and also built in support for AJAX push technology (aka COMET, which I will expand upon in upcoming posts. In the meantime checkout Alex Russel’s Blog, and the COMET page in Wikipedia) which we would be relying much upon in the Octabox service. The performance gain in those areas have convinced several prominent web-applications to go the Lighttpd way (Youtube, Meebo and Wikipedia among others).
For a performance comparison, Lighttpd provided benchmarks of their own (the page is a little messy, you’ve been warned) which claim superiority. Not everyone agrees. And some more benchmarks for good measure (taken from a blog on Ruby on Rails performance).
Even more benchmarks from a competing server technology, Litespeed.
So what does this all mean
Well, for now we intend to give Apache and Lighttpd equal chance at the being the backend to power Octabox. I am personally leaning towards Lighttpd from the impressions I got concerning performance and support for cutting-edge technologies, and hopefully we can provide our own benchmarks concerning the two solutions in the near future.
My personal preference is Litespeed for its simplicity and memory efficiency, which is especially important on a memory limited VPS. Nginx is my next choice, as its also simple to configure and manage, and its much more stable that LightTPD. I’ve had so many problems with LightTPD on production servers that I won’t ever run it again. I would rather use Apache if I had to choose between the two.
Comment by Dan Kubb — 11 Mar @ 6:00 pm
Thank you Dan for your input. I’ve yet to try out Lighttpd personally, so I can’t say anything about its stability. I also am not attracted to stand alone solutions like litespeed, but I may give them a try during beta phase.
Comment by Eran Galperin — 12 Mar @ 1:04 pm
My experience from lighttpd is negative. I’ve tried it with FreeBSD rackboxes and found it extremely buggy and much slower than Apache 2.2, serving both static and dynamic (fastcgi) content.
Not to mention lighttpd documentation which simply sucks.
Comment by Athan Dimoy — 14 Mar @ 4:12 am
Was this the latest 1.5 release?
Comment by Eran Galperin — 14 Mar @ 8:26 pm
I haven’t tried LightTPD 1.5 yet. Most of my problems were with 1.4.13. If for some reason you don’t like Litespeed Web Server, and you want to go with an open-source system, I’d recommend Nginx. It is by far the most stable of the light-weight open source web servers. Its easy to set up too, and super-fast.
Comment by Dan Kubb — 18 Mar @ 12:37 pm
Thanks, I would most certainly have a look at Nginx. My problem with Litespeed mainly is that it has some firewall issues (I had to turn off Kaspersky firewall for it to work)
Comment by Eran Galperin — 18 Mar @ 3:15 pm
I concure the comments on Nginx. This webserver definitely has a bright future. Not only rock stable but faster than both Lighttpd and Apache2.
Comment by Athan Dimoy — 06 Apr @ 11:18 am
Red…
Cool! Its really cool….
Trackback by Red — 21 Jun @ 2:17 am