Nick Tonkin wrote:
True, there is an upper limit on per-machine scalability with a multi-process server and thttpd would do better there if the network connection is not already saturated. In our case we benchmarked thttpd vs. a stripped apache 1.x and the performance was so close that we decided to go with the simpler route of using apache, which gave us SSL for images and the ability to run a single server for proxy and static page requests. It also made it easy to set "Expires" tags on images.Hmm, I think it all depends on the application. It's true that hardware costs have declined since The Days, but you still don't have unlimited RAM.
One possible factor in our good apache performance is the high locality of access for our static files. There was a very good chance that any requested file would already be cached in RAM. ValueClick was probably just the opposite.
- Perrin
