[olug] Apache alternatives

[Christopher Cashell]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Dave Rowe <dave at roweware.com> wrote:
> Linode is pretty cheap at $20/month, based on my experience at least.

I was going to suggest Linode, too.  I've been using them for almost 4
years, and I've been very happy with them.  $20/month gets you 512MB
of RAM, which isn't really "low memory" for a fairly dedicated web
server, unless you're expecting very high load, or have very
specialized web application requirements.

As for Apache, personally I find it's flexibility, performance, and
capability to be easily good enough for 99% of my needs.  In my
experience, when dealing with web apps serving dynamic content, it's
usually not Apache that is the memory hog, it's the application.
Unless you're certain the problem is with Apache, you may not get much
of a return for the work of switching[1].

This isn't to say that switching won't help, just a reminder to know
your bottlenecks very thoroughly before trying to optimize a system.
Often the "obvious" performance problem isn't really the problem.


> -Dave

[1] I know of two cases in the past year where a friend and a former
co-worker replaced Apache in a web application they felt wasn't
performing as well as desired.  Neither one of them got any better
performance from the switch.  One of them switched back, the other
left it (running under nginx) because he didn't want to waste more
time reverting.

-- 
Christopher