Add Comment
Source
Articles
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Delicious Delicious
Digg Digg
StumbleUpon StumbleUpon
Facebook Facebook
Google Google
Yahoo Yahoo
Technorati Technorati
2
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
By admin
This article discusses Drupal 5.5 and Lighttpd 1.4, with special consideration for the imagecache module 5.x-1.3.
Building websites that can handle high amounts of traffic involves finding points of scalability in the network architecture. There is a lot of discussion about database replication and redundant web servers, but very little discussion has taken place about serving static files from a different server than the one which executes PHP. This article shows how you can configure Drupal to serve static files from a separate server, potentially on a separate machine. There is even a solution for those of you who are using the imagecache module.
Static vs Dynamic content
A webpage in your browser usually consists of HTML plus Javascript, images, CSS, and perhaps some Flash. The typical order of events is that the browser requests the HTML, parses it, and then begins to request the additional .js, .css, .png, .gif, and .flv files. This sequence is well diagrammed on the Yahoo! Developer Network. For Drupal sites, the initial request that returns the HTML is a dynamic request, meaning PHP code and a database are required to generate the HTML. The rest of the requests, however, reference static files. These files require neither PHP nor a database and can be returned to the browser by the simplest and most lightweight web servers available. This is the fundamental difference between a dynamic request (one that requires a script language like PHP) and a static request (one which returns an simple file from the file system).
For a web server like Apache to serve a dynamic Drupal page, it must load extra software (mod_php) in order to be able to execute PHP. This extra software increases the memory footprint of the server and reduces the total number of requests that it can handle before the machine’s physical memory is exhausted. Even more memory intensive is the act of executing PHP. A Drupal site with lots of modules installed that handles a lot of data from the database can easily require 64M of memory per thread. This is a huge expenditure of memory compared to the 1-2M it takes to serve a static file. Since Apache recycles its worker threads, you end up in a situation where the same 64M monster that created the Drupal HTML is also used for serving a .jpg file. This is a huge waste of resources.
Adding a static file server to your network thus brings the following advantages:
Static files are served from a server optimized for the task
Better utilization of “heavy” PHP server resources
A new point for scalability; you can add more machines to run static file servers if needed using typical load balancing techniques