Eradicating PHP from the face of Recoil

Posted by avsm Sun, 25 Jul 2004 22:46:49 GMT

I used to do an awful lot of PHP hacking, but over the last few years, the boring gods of security and correctness have snared me, leaving me frustrated with the effort and resources required to create and maintain dynamic web content.

So I've converted my site over to static HTML, and started switching our main web-servers to use thttpd instead of Apache. The performance difference has been absolutely staggering, as the humble hardware behind fork.recoil.org managed to survive a slashdotting and mentions on opengl.org (for the latest release of OpenFX) without breaking a sweat.

thttpd is great; it uses the BSD kqueue(3) kernel event mechanism, and is single-threaded (removing the endearing fork-bomb effect Apache has when hit by a burst of traffic). There are quite a few good programs to help generate static content as well; my new blogging tool of choice is blosxom, which fits into the UNIX way of doing things absolutely perfectly.