fatvegan

There are issues with lighttpd1.4.11-3ubuntu1 and I'm guessing lighttpd1.4.11-3 in general. I had some weird experiences with PHP CGI, and the FastCGI instances freezing up and the webserver becoming unusable. Overall lighty is tops, but I've had odd instability problems with both Ruby and PHP on it now. Although it may be because FastCGI is still a bit fresh, and not a problem with lighty itself.

To create the bug I hit a WordPress homepage with ab -n50 -c10 http://tumble.rocks/. It would reliably fail, although -c1 (no concurrency) seemed to work. Restarting always fixed the problem. I used top to monitor the php4-cgi processes, and they'd start out with activity and then every one would drop to zero CPU activity. Eventually ab would timeout.

I'm running Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy. The lighttpd package that failed was an Ubuntu package, but the hoary package I have now (1.4.8-4hoary1) seems to be stable.

Update: It wasn't that stable. So I upgraded to a specially compiled breezy package. It was less stable. So I have gone back again. I'd go back to Apache, but I've become seriously addicted to lighttpd's configuration and speediness. So much better.