Years ago, I was working at a small startup here in Austin (named “Ihiji”), and it was my job to completely rebuild their cloud systems infrastructure. They wanted to use lighttpd instead of Apache. It took a while, but with a bit of a kickstart from a friend who worked at Opscode Chef (thanks, Matt Ray!), I was able to get that done.
With Apache, at their current max load, the systems would just completely fall over, but with lighttpd, at that same load, the system breathed a little hard. I could push lighttpd 10x more before it fell over.
Then we started looking at replacing the haproxy solution, and I looked at nginx. I tried it out. I also tried out replacing lighttpd with nginx. And no matter how hard I pushed nginx, I couldn’t get the damn thing to breathe hard. I couldn’t even push the load average up over 1.0.
We went back to lighttpd and haproxy because those tools gave us better monitoring and logging, but we always held nginx in our back pocket in reserve, in case we needed another 10x beyond what lighttpd+haproxy could do.
And yes, I did get invited to Edinburgh to do a nice little talk on the subject.
They had their ups and downs over the years, but ihiji did end up getting acquired by Control4, and the founders are now off doing other weird and cool things.
With Apache, at their current max load, the systems would just completely fall over, but with lighttpd, at that same load, the system breathed a little hard. I could push lighttpd 10x more before it fell over.
Then we started looking at replacing the haproxy solution, and I looked at nginx. I tried it out. I also tried out replacing lighttpd with nginx. And no matter how hard I pushed nginx, I couldn’t get the damn thing to breathe hard. I couldn’t even push the load average up over 1.0.
We went back to lighttpd and haproxy because those tools gave us better monitoring and logging, but we always held nginx in our back pocket in reserve, in case we needed another 10x beyond what lighttpd+haproxy could do.
And yes, I did get invited to Edinburgh to do a nice little talk on the subject.
They had their ups and downs over the years, but ihiji did end up getting acquired by Control4, and the founders are now off doing other weird and cool things.