I’ve been using lighttpd for various projects with great results. A few days ago I had to optimize a server that was running lighttpd but has degraded its performance during the past weeks. I was able to see quite easily that the problem was IO bound as the number of files was growing very fast, while the folders were not arranged very well. Lighttpd was starting to slowdown while blocked on disk IO requests.  We needed a quick solution to buy us some time while we improve the backend files layout.

Having used nginx for some time now on some bigger sites that this one, my first thought for a quick solution was to increase the number of lighttpd workers as I have done with nginx. Lighttpd supports this, but looking at their documentation page we can see:
“DO NOT USE THIS OPTION IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT DOES
DO NOT REPORT ERRORS OR BUGS IF YOU DID NOT TEST WITHOUT THIS OPTION SET
THIS OPTION MOST LIKELY WILL NOT BOOST YOUR PERFORMANCE, ITS MOST LIKELY YOUR BACKEND”
wow… talk about a warning

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While working on setting up a monitoring solution for a big wordpress installation, I realized that the server-status url was not working as expected even if mod_status was configured correctly:

ExtendedStatus On
<Location /server-status>
SetHandler server-status
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from some_ips
</Location>

The .htaccess wordpress rules were taking over this and the server-status url was returning a page not found error from within wordpress. This was happening because of the way how the rewrite rules are setup to handle all the permalinks on the site, and for any non-existing file send it to index.php: Read the rest of this entry »