Ryan McKern

For those unaware, I'm an Apache web server admin­is­tra­tor. How­ever, for the last few years, a vari­ety of other web servers have been gain­ing in pop­u­lar­ity and build­ing ded­i­cated fol­low­ings around them­selves. 8 years ago when I started Web­slum your web server options were basi­cally iPlanet (now Sun Java Sys­tem Web Server), Apache, and IIS (which no one but Win­dows admin­is­tra­tors and suits took seri­ously then).

How­ever, since then nginx, lighttpd, and Lite­Speed have all gained var­i­ous fol­low­ings due to the things they do bet­ter (or don't do at all) over Apache. Apache is sort of a swiss army knife, in that it's infi­nitely exten­si­ble but much like a swiss army knife, it's also not always very good at every­thing that it does. Ever try to use the swiss army scis­sors to cut any­thing more than newsprint? I don't rec­om­mend it under the best cir­cum­stances. It will end in stitches.

lighttpd in par­tic­u­lar has come up as pop­u­lar with the Rails crowd, though that's being phased out in favor of Phu­sion Pas­sen­ger (also known as mod_rails, though mod_rack might be more appro­pri­ate any day now).

So, this week I plan to sit down and start with this com­par­i­son on Wikipedia, and then eval­u­ate both my own needs and the needs of my hosted sites to see if Apache is truly the best fit for my needs. Maybe I'll even go so far as to set up a shoot-out with some bench­marks. But prob­a­bly not. My lazi­ness is notorious.