What perfromance improvement will I get by moving to lighttpd from Apache?

Question

I currently have a cluster of 4 Apache web servers which are used to serve up static files of up to 30Mb in size. Generally, I can expect up to 5000 concurrent connections to these servers. What performance improvement would I expect to get by moving this to lighttpd?

Answer 1

I would expect it to handle the concurrency with much more ease and less memory overhead. I've stopped deploying Apache pretty much everywhere I can.

You may also consider nginx for a comparison.

Answer 2

If you are using Apache with MPM with worker or event you probably won't see much of a difference. If you haven't moved to using them I would give that a try. There isn't really any problem with lighttpd though either. I think today it is just a matter of picking one and going with it.

If I where serving that type of file I would push it out to a CDN and not have to worry about it. There are plenty of cheap ones now like CacheFly and Amazon's Cloudfront.