Title: Which to use on low spec CPU?
Tags: apache;nginx;lighttpd;litespeed
Question: I have a dedicated server where i'm only the user in it.
Processor : AMD Sempron 3100+
Memory : 1GB DDR I
I'm using PHP for website. Its mostly used for downloading stuff and uploading and so.
I currently using apache, it eats too much processor.
So i came across few better then apache. I need to know which one of this good for downloading/uploading, nginx, lighttpd or litespeed?
Thanks
Comment: I'll just point out the obvious here, that if you run `top` on a typical apache+php server, and you see `httpd` taking up loads of CPU and/or ram, then it's almost always PHP running inside Apache that's taking up all your CPU, not apache itself.


Here is another answer: I have used PHP in machines as “low end” as an AMD Geode LX800 (500 MHz, 256 MiB of RAM), using a stock Debian install and the Apache 2, PHP5 and PostgreSQL packages provided by Debian. In general, most things work well, but you want to take care of lenghty operations (e.g. avoid resizing big images with the GD extension) and always be aware of the implied cost of operations which usually seems “easy”. My particular application was serving about 25 simultaneous clients without performance problems, and in my tests it maintained a decent time-per-request up to a hundred of simultaneous clients.

Here is another answer: Take a look at the benchmarks for lighttpd vs apache

Here is another answer: I would recommend Apache but only 2.2.x
Here's a small benchmark that was done. and as you can see, serving php, Apache 2.2.2 is better than lighty

Here is another answer: Its hard to beat apache in my opinion, perhaps look at enabling disable mod_deflate etc might speed things up for you.

Here is another answer: Zeus is a high-performance web server aimed at the *Ahem* 'Static Content' industry.  It will serve biblical volumes of files with minimal resources.  I believe it uses asynchronous I/O, and is very quick on modest hardware.

Here is another answer: My guess is that your performance problems are related to the PHP code and not Apache. So look if you can optimize your PHP code instead.

Here is another answer: You may find that installing APC will help a lot. Without it, or another byte-code cache, Apache will have to re-compile the PHP files on every invocation.  While it doesn't take much effort, it does add up surprsingly quickly. You'll be surprised how useful 64MB for APC (which out of 1024Mb is not too much) will help your system, depending on how much code you are actually running (you may only need half or a quarter of that given to APC).
If it's a busy site, then optimising it with Yslow will also help, as will taking the static content (like image) away from having Apache server them.  It's here that Nginx can make a small, fast improvement to page times, and memory use. I've used just that technique of a separate image server myself, and to excellent effect.

Here is another answer: You might want to try Nginx reverse-proxying requests to a php-cgi instance. Doesn't get any more spartan than that.
But I agree with Paul, Apache is hard to beat as far as maintainability / configurability goes.

Here is another answer: Definitely, I suggest lighttpd. I'm using it on different heavy load servers and it helped a lot!

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