This Space for Rent

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It doesn’t take much to slashdot my web server

Reddit upgraded to a fairly recent version of discount just the other day, and mentioned that they did so on their weblog this morning.

So there was a modest uptick in traffic to tsfr and gehenna today. 1100 or so hits via reddit, and a handful of hits from other sites coming in to slurp up newer versions of discount.

It was as if someone had dipped the server in molasses.

gehenna has been living on a virtual machine for the past six months or so, and it’s not a very large virtual machine (64mb core, 10gb disk, a slice of a quad-core Q8200; it’s half the memory, but everything else as large or larger than the old freebsd 4.10 physical machine) but once apache starts trying to serve up web pages that 64mb goes all to hell pretty quickly.

I’d switch to thttpd, except that I do virtual hosting and

  1. thttpd’s virtual hosting setup is ugly, and
  2. I use differently named userdirs for the virtual hosts (weblog. -> ~user/weblog; www. -> ~user/WWW) which thttpd doesn’t do.

And I foolishly use mod_perl and mod_php, both of which are painfully slow on more modern machines.

So I’ll grit my teeth and wait for a while; maybe I can set up some sort of hybrid system where I use thttpd+local hackery to serve all the static and cgi-driven webpages I’ve got, but retain the much larger webserver that is apache for my perl and php needs.

And I’ll just have to hope slashdot doesn’t link to me.

—orc Mon Oct 25 22:25:50 2010

Comments

You could compromise and use nginx (or even lighttpd, although it annoys me greatly).

But where’s the fun in that?

Anonymous Coward Mon Nov 1 13:11:30 2010

I’ve looked at lighttpd, but the lightttpd website is about as light on technical information as it is heavy on self-congratulation, so I’ve not been overly willing to spend the time configuring it to test it out.

I’ve never even heard of nginx (which sounds like a name Russell Hoban made up), but I’ll have to take a look. I see there are some (unfortunately very linux-specific) instructions out there for doing fastcgi'ed php with it, so if I could get that working as well as perl it would make a good thing to test.

David Parsons Mon Nov 1 20:48:18 2010

nginx is actually pretty well-established; it was developed to serve some popular, silly Russian portal site, and now it’s popular with all the irritating Ruby on Rails, Web 79.24 crowd, but in my experience it’s stable, simple and fast.

the same, now ironically-named Anonymous Coward Wed Nov 3 12:31:14 2010

Comments are closed