So Amy Hoy has some thoughts about surviving a Digging. She's quick to dismiss Apache in favor of lighttpd, which honestly surprises me.
Podbop served 10,502 page views on February 23 according to Google Analytics, when it was near the top of del.icio.us/popular. Amy received 152% more page views (16,010) according to Mint. (I'm going to ignore her Webalizer numbers because Mint and Google Analytics have quite similar profiles: they are both invoked via JavaScript.)
To compare, Podbop runs as three FastCGI listeners under Apache 2.0.55 on a Linode 160, which has 160 MB of RAM and a guaranteed CPU speed of 200 MHz. Amy says that her Typo instance runs under Apache on a dual PIII. Without knowing more about Amy's setup, it's hard to draw any real conclusions here.
Still, I don't think Apache is to blame here. Podbop didn't have any caching on February 23, and while it certainly broke a sweat, it was not in danger of being replaced by static content. :-)
My guess is that Amy's FastCGI setup isn't tuned very well, or she's got a lot of other stuff happening on that server. Don't forget, Mint runs at least one MySQL INSERT per page view in addition to the cost of the PHP.
So Amy, if you see this, please run benchmarks at each step of the tuning process. I'd be really interested to see if switching from Apache to lighttpd (with no other changes) makes a huge difference.
Posted by dwc in Programming at 07:46 PM