Brion Vibber wrote:
Daniel Friesen wrote:
For lighttpd vs. Apache. lighttpd is a lightweight webserver, and does have a real performance benefit over serving out images with bloated Apache.
We started using lighty to serve images in 2005: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/November_2005_image_server
Domas did a fair amount of benchmarking and testing on this over the months prior to the switch, including working with the author on some fixes, and it was a pretty clear winner at the time.
Domas tested CPU performance, which lighttpd did much better than Apache, especially in the large file case, because at the time, lighttpd used sendfile() and Apache didn't. Since 2.0.44, Apache has sendfile support, and our storage servers use negligible CPU anyway, they're disk bound. So it's pretty likely that we could put apache on them with no significant performance loss.
-- Tim Starling