Better, stronger, faster!
I've been playing with the idea of some more performance hacks on my web server for a while and finally decided to implement a few of them. The server is now running lighttpd for serving static content and doing things like compression and SSL (not yet online). lighttpd is setup as a reverse proxy to Apache that runs Django under mod_python and PHP under FastCGI. I will be putting PHP's FastCGI module directly on the lighttpd server as soon as I figure out how to get it working. PHP isn't a high priority for me at the moment because very few of the web apps I run actually make use of it. I may also play with running Django is FastCGI mode, but from what I've read recently, mod_python tends to perform better.
A few people have asked for more detailed descriptions of my web server setup and to that end, I've started writing a document that goes through every step of the lighttpd/Apache/MySQL/Python/PHP/Django setup similar to the way Linux from scratch does. I'm hoping that I can dispel some of the myths surrounding web server performance tweaking and get some people to consider doing things the right way rather than just throwing more hardware at the problem.
Following that document, I'll also be writing one on Asterisk performance tweaks. There is surprisingly little information on the internet about getting Asterisk into a low-memory/CPU environment without sacrificing functionality.
In the meantime, I'm looking for a job. If anybody has room for a UNIX/Linux Sysadmin on their team, I'd like to hear from you. You can email me at synack