How to handle 1000?s of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS | mm

DEC 1, 2009
lighttpd as a front end to a fastcgi app is the same basic design. You’re putting a finite-state-machine designed web server that uses a single thread and can handle a huge number of concurrent connections in front of a one-thread-per-connection application server.
Lighttpd vs Nginx is just personal preference. I haven’t used Lighttpd enough to give you a good opinion on it but Nginx’s configuration file is very flexible, it has some great modules, it can also run as multiple processes so that you can use all your CPU cores on a heavily loaded site. I’ve been using Nginx in production and I regularly handle over 30,000 concurrent connections daily with nginx with hardly any server load (reverse proxying to apache).