Thanks everyone for the helpful comments yesterday on Apache vs. lighttpd. I’ve taken the first few steps towards improving things. I’ve eliminated mod_php5, switched all PHP to FastCGI, and switched from the prefork to the event MPM.

The event MPM docs say that it’s incompatible with mod_ssl, but it worked, and googling for that turned up mailing list posts from 2006 saying it was fixed.

The only real glitch was that egroupware inexplicably depends on libapache2-mod-php5. It works fine without it, but I had to create a fakelibapache2-mod-php5 that provides libapache2-mod-php5 to convince the system not to remove egroupware when I switched to the event MPM.

I went from 28 Apache processes to 4 Apache processes plus an average of around 2 php5-cgi processes — which, despite the name, actually do grok FastCGI. Three of my Apache processes now have an RSS of about 20M, and the other of about 30M. The php5-cgi processes are at around 40M. My old Apache processes ranged from 18M to over 40M. So there is some memory savings here, though not drastic.

My Redmine processes, two of them, each use over 50M. Ruby on Rails still is leaving me with a bad taste. At least it’s not a Java app; it seems a lot of those allocate 2GB before they ever start accepting connections.

I’ll see how this goes for awhile, but for now I doubt that moving to lighttpd (or similar) will yield enough benefit to make it worth the effort. But there may be some benefit in inserting a caching proxy in front of Apache, so I may yet do that.