RASPBERRY WEBSERVER
(Posted 2014-09-10 20:05:57 by corey_reichle)

The site is no longer hosted on a RPi... Sadly, hosting more than one site
on it was pretty slow, and so I've migrated it to a 1U server I had laying
about.



So, while looking to trim a bit of cost, I've been looking into how my web
hosting plays in. Now, the hosting plan I use isn't all that pricey
($99/year), I figure I can trim that down a bit. I use PmWiki as the CMS
for this site, but I don't really need a dynamically compiled page every
time. I just like the ease of editing the site that comes with a CMS.
So, I grabbed down the site, configured a nightly sync using lftp to mirror
the site contents down (Actual code) onto a Raspberry Pi. Then, I went to
work configuring apache2. It _worked_, but not so great. Page rendering was
kinda slow.
So, my next plan of attack was to switch to lighttpd. After learning a bit
about how different apache and lighttpd's mod_rewrite works (See those
pretty URL's in the address bar? mod_rewrite rules). After all that,
performance might have been a little better.
Research led me down some holes: APC Cache, XCache, Varnish even... blech.
But then, a light bulb went off: How about just serving the site as static
content, and rebuild the site periodically?
So, that's where I'm at now: I've got the new vhost configured, and working
on setting up the static content to be served. Initial tests show it to be
slamming in performance on the Raspberry Pi. I can set it so it rebuilds
the site contents once an hour or so. I don't need instant page changes.
Just for comparison, the following are the copies of this site, hosted on
the RPi:
Static versison: http://static.coreyreichle.com [
http://static.coreyreichle.com/ ]
Dynamic, live: http://dynamic.coreyreichle.com [
http://dynamic.coreyreichle.com/ ]
The dynamic site performance isn't all that different from this version,
just a bit of initial lag during render. The static version is (Obviously)
slamming.

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There is 1 comment on this post:

Comment #1 by Carl ( audrey.hebert@gmail.com ) on 2015-11-27 18:00:56
Great article.


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