lighttpd

[marrandy]

http://www.lighttpd.net/

supposed to be about 3 times faster than apache.

Anyone tried it with sugarcrm ?

I'm looking at sugarcrm at the moment and am wondering about overall performance. I read the several interesting threads on performance tuning but didn't see any mention of lighttpd.

I would like to hear from anyone that has sunstituted lighttpd for apache.

marrandy

[mycrmspacegunnar]

Hi,

We use lighttpd together with SugarCRM.
Lighttpd is superior to Apache in many ways.

Please mind that "3 times the performance" is meant when delivering thousands of small files per second.
Apache beeing a bit fat and slooow, can in such a situation never compete with lighttpd.

When you are benchmarking Sugar on lighttpd then you will only notice a very small improvement.
But the big advantage of lighttp and using fastcgi is that you seperate webserver work from the PHP engine job.

This seperation will allow your
a) to spread to load over several php-servers
b) seveal resources as database will be only bound by the php-engine and not depend on for example lingering client browsers.

So by seperating the two works (webserver/php-engine) from each other,
your resources as for example database connections will be used much more effective.

If you search for LIGHHTPD in the above search then you should find some more post about server optimizations
and out scaling of sugar related to lighttpd.

Cheers
Gunnar

[Angel]

I've played with it before. Just as a bit of warning, you may find yourself needing to tweak all kinds of things here and there just to get it to the point of being able to install Sugar.

Its been a while since I played with it, so it may be a different nowadays. The other point I spent a lot of cycles on was finding relevant documentation, in particular in how to get it to talk to PHP. There is some out there, but very superficial, then again, maybe by now there is more detailed info out there.

[mycrmspacegunnar]

I've played with it before. Just as a bit of warning, you may find yourself needing to tweak all kinds of things here and there just to get it to the point of being able to install Sugar.

Erm, any new tools has a learning curve
but generally Lighttpd is not difficult to use and Sugar will install out of the box with it.

If you have normally installed Lighttpd with fastcgi PHP then Sugar will install without any problems and without any tweaking!.

I'm using Lighttpd for many years now.
I have used and adminstrated most of the different Webservers available on the market.
Lighttpd is actually not more complicated than Apache for example.
And if you get stuck then the Lighttpd mailing list is usually very helpfull.

But you need to mind that while the syntax of Lighttpd is not difficult,
it is different to Apache and you will need to read to manual to be able to install and configure it.


Besides Lighttpd there are of course several other webbrowsers available which are all much faster than Apache.

Zeus was known to be one of the best Webserers
http://www.zeus.com/
Zeus is very fast, reliable, easy to use and comes with support.
But Zeus was always a bit pricy.

LITESPEED
http://www.litespeedtech.com/
Lightspeed is very easy to use (nice web admin interface)
Lightspeed is much faster than Apache !
Lightspeed is free in the Standard edition but the advanced Enterprise edition is commercial.

LIGHTTP
http://www.lighttpd.net/
Is very fast and slim. Configuration is config file based. (Different Syntax then Apache)
Its free.



But one think you need to mind.
When you deliver normal HTML files than a typical webserver can archive thousends of pages per second
with hundreds of simultanous users.

On a certain hardware Apache might only be able to deliver 500 pages per second.
But the other webserver mentioned above might be able to archive 1000 or more pages.

Using such faster webserver is of big advantage for sites having several million page views per hour.


But how does this translate to SUGAR?

IT DOES NOT !
If you expect that SUGAR will run much faster on the other webserver than you will be very dissapointed.

For us SUGAR is the main bottleneck NOT the webserver !
With Sugar you typically have a page creation time of 0.1 - 1.0 seconds.

This means you can at maximum deliver 1 to 10 pages per second!
That limit of Apache not beeeing able to deliver over a 1000 pages per second is totally unimportant here.
Using a different webserver which is able to deliver more pages and work with many more users than apachge
will not help you as SUGAR simple is not able to do this.

So yes, its true that for normal files LIGHTTP, ZEUS, Lightspeed are much faster than Apache.
But this will not make a difference at all as SUGAR will alaways be the limiting factor long time before the Apache limits are reached.

Not using MOD_PHP and splitting the webserver from the PHP-engine will still have some advantages and allow you better scaling of huge installs over several servers.
But do NOT expect that simply replacing Apache will have any visible perfromance effect.

What you can do and should do to improve the performance of your Sugar install is to configure your webserver properly
to reduce unnessasary work and overhead.
I can recommend you to follow the instructions is the beliw thread to tune your server.
http://www.sugarcrm.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16649


Cheers
Gunnar

[georgev]

Erm, any new tools has a learning curve
but generally Lighttpd is not difficult to use and Sugar will install out of the box with it.
.....
...
Cheers
Gunnar

ZenServer can be used to run SugarCRM . We tried it as a 'SugarCRM VMWare Virtual Machine' and the following page has more details :
http://marthomacentre.org.uk/ml/mod/...view.php?id=80

'ZenServer Moodle VM' from the download link was to test SugarCRM and print the PDF file


With all the best wishes for a Happy New Year

George