Posts Tagged webserver
Cherokee Web Server… when lighter and faster is a must
Sometimes when it comes to choosing a web server we always end up in the same decision: Apache… it’s alright, it’s the most widely used web server but that doesn’t mean it’s the best one.

When we started with Inkzee we didn’t think too much about other alternatives… we started with Apache and it’s not that we had big complaints about it, but having all the backend in one machine made us have performance/low resource consumption requirements and after a few months of our service running the all the different backend subsystems were almost killing the server and we started to research alternatives.
We were going to change Apache for Lighttpd but then we stepped into Cherokee statistics and after reading some reviews we decided to give it a try, the numbers spoke for themselves. We had been checking on Che
rokee for some years now, the project was mature enough for our needs so we went for it.
After a year and a half we can write our own lessons-learned from our experience:
- The Cherokee team have been so responsive to every problem or tweak we wanted to do with our server.
- The admin interface is pretty rad, if you are not used to messing with config files you’ll find no challenge.
- We didn’t miss anything: FastCGI, PHP, TLS and SSL, Load Balancer, Reverse Proxy, statics cache, …
- And the most important for us: our servers stand the load so much better now… indeed now we are still able to have our service in just one server
So, dare to try it now that Cherokee is celebrating their version 1.0 release, it’s a really nice product worth trying.
Better performance
Because for us, speed is one of our primary targets, we’ve just pushed a new update to our backend that enables memcache support for some parts of our code. It’s not all there yet, but the basics are there and response times will start getting better.
Right now, you’ll be able to experience a much better performance when reading posts and fetching a list of titles from a given feed. During the next days we hope the response time will get better and better.
We’ve also migrated our webservers today from Apache to Cherokee. Although Apache is excellent in many ways, we don’t need a fully loaded Apache, so we’ve chosen Cherokee which is working fine for us.
Thanks a lot for your patient!! And please, do sends us an email with any feedback you’ve got!
Have a nice weekend all!
