[development] What is the best web server to host drupal (like Apache, Apache Tomcat, etc) as far as performance, security?

[Mark Schoonover]

John

Disclaimer: I'm in the Drupal hosting business.

Performance all depends upon how you're using Drupal. Drupal can be used
for brochure type sites where the content doesn't change much, and
there's not a lot of additional modules installed or custom developed.
Drupal can have numerous & custom modules installed, on a heavily used
server, the bottle neck can be all that PHP code getting compiled. It's
also possible Drupal is used for audio/video streaming, where network
bandwidth may be the bottleneck. If your Drupal site has a ton of
dynamic content, lots of nodes getting created, etc, the database could
be a huge issue as well. What I'm getting to, it's very important to
know how your site is being used, how Drupal is configured before
jumping into what's best. Premature optimization is the root of all
evil. :)

Apache is the defacto standard when it comes to hosting Drupal. It's
developed on Apache, tested on Apache, and just about all general
hosting companies use the stock LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack that
comes with their choice of OS. There are other web servers too -
lighttpd ( I base my hosting images using lighttpd ), and Nginx is
another. Apache is pretty much guaranteed to work, lots of hosting
companies use it, but depending upon the type of hosting, performance
tuning may not be allowed.

By developing a comprehensive site benchmarking process that mimics the
way your Drupal site is used, you can make changes to the webserver, PHP
environment, and/or MySQL database to see the impact on site
performance. Your site may reach a stage where you'll need separate web,
database servers and require memcached, APC or using a content delivery
network.

Once you start playing with site performance, it's really a bunch of fun
figuring it all out.


Regards,
Mark Schoonover

-- 
http://www.thetajoin.com - The High Performance Drupal & SEO Proxy
Hosting Company
http://blog.thetajoin.com - Techneeks for High Performance Drupal
Email: mark at thetajoin.com :: Voice: 619-928-4473 :: Fax: 619-374-3130



On Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:06 -0400, "John Mitchell"
<mitchelljj98 at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the best web server to host drupal (like Apache, Apache
> Tomcat, etc) as far as performance, security?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John
> 
> -- 
> John J. Mitchell
>