Ask HN: In-memory Webserver

2 pointstwopoint71817 years ago5 comments

I've been thinking about my needs for a webserver and seeing as how I'm only going to be serving static pages I want to concentrate on speed and simplicity. In my scenario I'll have a set of pages that aren't going to change, and if they do, taking down the server would be okay. My question is then:

Is there a webserver that, when started, reads all pages into memory and then never touches the disk again? Would a similar effect be better achieved with something like Apache + memcached? Other suggestions?

cperciva 17y

Other suggestions?

You're thinking way too hard. As long as you have enough RAM, your operating system will cache data; so you don't need to do anything fancy at all. Set up whatever web server you like, in the default configuration, and measure its performance; odds are that you'll find that you don't need to tune anything at all.

wmf 17y

Seconded; for extra performance enable sendfile().

jacquesm 17y

I'm using apache+varnishd, I've heard good stuff about http://nginx.net/

Good luck!

sambeau 17y

you could serve from a ram disk

yrashk 17y

nginx+memcached or nginx+ramfs?

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