Bye Apache, Hello Lighttpd
Along this week I’ve been reading the documentation of lighttpd, a light and fast web server.
Encouraged by its simplicity I installed and replicated my apache configuration (4 virtual hosts, some complex rewrite rules for a zope site…) in two non complete days. And I liked it, it is light and fast as they stated, but it’s really simple too. After two more days testing some things, mainly SSI and python CGIs, I took the decision to substitute the good ol’ apache with lighttpd.
Today I’ve done it and except a few minor issues regarding non complete support for SSI’s exec and the replacement of several .htaccess with lighttpd’s own method of authentication, it has been straightforward. Not much scientific measurements show virtual memory comsumption has lowered from ~27 MB to ~3 MB, and some large pages loading time improve ~33%.
Also, as far as I finish the new Katxi web site I’ll be able to get rid of zope and MySQL too, replaced by CherryPy and sqlite. Not that I don’t like them, they are great, but perhaps too cumbersome for my needs, not so complex personal webs. But as this will be announced soon, I won’t add more now.
By the way, I’ve also slightly changed http://inigo.katxi.org site, replacing old-style tables with more modern CSS techniques.