What web server to choose?

Rails
1

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!

2

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.

3

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.

4

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

www.ashleafmedia.com | [email protected] | 832.514.5726