For a while now I’ve been toying around with the idea of utilizing Lighttpd for various web based applications. One of these application is my Automatic Dialer framework, also known as the GTD-API. The main issue with the GTD-API (besides that it is highly reliant on a MySQL database), is the fact that all requests have to be processed via XML-RPC HTTP post requests.

The main issue that I had was this: in a production scenario, a dialer management system will generate over 100 requests to the XML-RPC server. While Apache is fully capable of rendering services at such a speed, its increasing size and boilerplate automatically introduce a management issue. In addition, as I was trying to build a dialer appliance that can be used in any enterprise, the ever expanding Apache wasn’t a good choice.

While I was looking at both NginX and Lighttpd, the latter captured my eye, thanks to a simple advantage – The integration of FastCGI based PHP was so easy, that it almost troubling that I used Apache all these years.

At this point, once I got Lighhtpd working with my Dialer, I said to myself: “It would be really cool to go about and send status reports back from the dialer, directly to the web client activating the call. In addition, I really don’t want to go about and perform these updates to the database, then query the database – that would, literally, kill the MySQL server.

So, I implemented a local session storage area for each call, which updated the call status as it traverses. The information was stored on the hard drive, which allowed a better response time than the ever indexing MySQL server. The status reports were picked up from the Lighttpd server via an Ajax client (which I didn’t write – I suck at JS) – and it works quite well.

I wonder, can Lighttpd completely replace Apache? … time will tell…