# What web server to choose?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-web-server-to-choose/92866>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 25, 2007, 7:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-web-server-to-choose/92866 "2007-04-25T07:38:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2007, 7:38am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-web-server-to-choose/92866/1 "2007-04-25T07:38:37Z")

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I’ve seen people moving from Lighttpd to Apache 2 based on blog posts,  
etc …

Then again some people have posted about lighty coming back into  
favor. I am confused, whats the current favourite ?

Is there one besides these ?

Thanks!

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2007, 7:46am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-web-server-to-choose/92866/2 "2007-04-25T07:46:38Z")

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Apache is great for handling incoming traffic, sorting it out and  
proxying to more task-specific servers like Mongrel. One of the  
reasons Lighty got so popular was that it had a more stable fcgi than  
Apache. If you move away from fcgi, then Apache can either proxy to  
Pound/Pen or do the balancing itself letting Mongrel serve the actual  
Rails pages.

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**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2007, 11:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-web-server-to-choose/92866/3 "2007-04-25T11:04:24Z")

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It also might depend on if you have specific requirements out of the  
servers and what you want to do with them. I’m not sure there is a  
“best”.

If you’re looking for good performance and small memory footprint, I  
can recommend Nginx. If you’re looking for good performance, small  
memory footprint, easy install/maintenance and is apache config  
compatible I can recommend LiteSpeed.

I hear really good things about the Lighty 1.5 release, I really hope  
they get some updates to mod\_proxy.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2007, 1:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-web-server-to-choose/92866/4 "2007-04-25T13:47:45Z")

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## I’m in favor of Apache 2.x, personally. But I think that that is more because I already know how to work with apache. I stick with it because what brings the money in is building web pages, not messing with web servers. Apache gets the job done well, since I just use it to front for mongrel. I have been wanting to take a look at NginX though…

Nathan Garza

AshLeaf Media | Owner

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