Cost in speed? [LWN.net]

Cost in speed?

Posted Apr 3, 2007 13:03 UTC (Tue) by nigelm (subscriber, #622)
In reply to: The April, 2007 Netcraft Web Server Survey by eklitzke
Parent article: The April, 2007 Netcraft Web Server Survey

> this of course comes with a definite cost in terms of overall speed and the ability to scale with concurrency

This is making the assumption that the apache encouraged method of pushing everything into one process (as in mod_p*) makes things faster and more scalable. With lighttpd you tend to use fastcgi for persistant processes instead, which makes it easier to scale the number of processes used for dynamic content appropriately (they can also be on different machines if you wish), whilst still allowing static content to fired out by the main server so avoiding the apache tendancy to split out static and dynamic servers.
Additionally since the dynamic stuff is running in a different process, you can make it run as a different user - better security separation. All at a speed which is at least as good as apache.

BTW there are some additional tweaks in lighttpd 1.5.x which promise to make external processes even faster.

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