Breathing space for my virtual server by using lighttpd.

2006/11/08 09:37:00

Some time ago I moved from servelocity to bytemark for my hosting. I was having problems with running out of memory on a regular basis. The main problems was that as it was a virtual server I could never tell as it was always using all of it’s 24Gb of RAM! So I moved to bytemark who use user-mode-linux and are soon to move to xen. I now have a little server with 80Mb of my own RAM. Now this is quite small for all the rubbish that I want to run but at least I can see what is going on and when it starts to swap I can do something about it rather than processes just dying with a “Out of memory error”. I have been running apace2 for my web serving for a while and I have been trying to limit its memory usage but never really been happy with a few processes each taking up 16Mb of my VM (I know some of that is shared but it’s still quite a lot)
The move to lighty was pretty simple, I installed it at home on my server dug about a bit, enabled the cgi and ssl modules and ran it up. Less than 2.5Mb! I have setup virtual hosts, ssl, and php support and it’s still running really sweet.
Next I just needed to setup the redirects for wordpress which is really the reason for this entry I added the following:
$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/ramble/" {
server.error-handler-404 = "/ramble/index.php?error=404"
}

Looks like it works! So I copied the configs over to my virtual server and stopped apache and started up lighttpd and hay presto I now have a few Mb of free RAM (up to 30Mb when it’s quiet) and 30Mb in use for caching so things are starting to fly now!
Now lets see how stable it is, as apache for all it’s sins has been rock solid.

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