Lighttpd
Ever since i started this blog i have been using Apache2 as the webserver and i have been quite happy with it, however recently i have noticed that it uses an insane amount of RAM. I have 240Meg of ram on this VPS and almost all of it was eaten by Apache after a few days uptime - even hacking the .conf files didn’t do too much to rectify this. So i decided to look elsewhere, having used lighttpd on my development machine since April i decided that i could probably roll it out on here. This was really easy to accomplish and wordpress was nice and simple to setup afterwards in order to maintain my permalink structure - there are plenty of blog posts out there on exactly how to do this so i won’t add to that comment on here.
Generally i think as a web-server it is easier to set-up and configure than apache - setting up an RRD perl script to log my RAM and CPU usage was a dodle as was all the fastCGI stuff. I’ve not yet tried to do anything too fancy like serving a ROR app or a JAVA app or anything like that, although now i have the RAM to spare i might have to give it a go…