Too Much Cookies Network

Yesterday my hoster had a slight problem with his tcp-stack and therefor no data would be transfered to the outside world. Every time a client started a connection, Apache would start a thread, which apparently did execute the request but then the resulting data couldn’t be transfered to the client completely. Even using ssh the data was dripping in very slowly and sometimes the answer to a simple ‘ps aux’ stopped in the middle and didn’t continue..

First i thought the problem is in my apache configuration and tried different things to optimize that. When at last it wouldn’t work at all and when i saw that even ssh wasn’t working so smoothly, i thought I’d call them and they confirmed the problem..

In the meanwhile - while the technicians were working on solving that problem - i got myself interested in lighttpd and thought i’d give it a try. And I’m impressed!

Lighty is really lightweight, the main task uses about 1% of my memory - that’s about 3MB. It doesn’t start more than one task which is a great comfort looking at, compared to apache2. The inclusion of php5 is very easy and performance options are easy to find. The php tasks - bound by fastcgi - keep running after completing the task. This makes starting and stopping the task everytime there is a new request obsolete.

The documentation is reasonable and many examples of configuration files can be found all over the net.