Mark's blog

In my role as a sysadmin, the bulk of the Unix systems I administer are web servers, running the now standard open-source stack of Apache, MySQL and PHP (note that whatever my personal misgivings may be about those elements, they are pretty much the standard now and what's been mandated at work). If you're using PHP on Unix, it's pretty much taken for granted that you'll be running it through Apache via mod_php. In fact, it almost goes without syaing that if you're doing any kind of webserving on Unix at all, you'll most likely be using Apache. It's a setup that has perfomed well in each instance I've deployed it - from small personal sites and development systems, to the large high-traffic sites I'm responsible for at work. It's free, robust, and above all well documented.

So why am I now seriously considering ditching Apache ? One word :LigHTTPd. I'd been hearing a lot recently about this webserver, including the usual foaming at the mouth advocacy from the Ruby-On-Rails crowd - but more interestingly and certainly more pertinant to my circumstances, were the glowing reports of people running PHP through it. So, over the last few days I've been experimenting with it, culminating with moving all sites on this webserver (including my blog) over to Lighttpd. To put it mildly, I've been blown away. It's been a long time since I was this impressed with a piece of software, let alone something as apparently mundane as a webserver.