This afternoon, I finished replacing Apache httpd with Cherokee on Inigo's main server. Now Squid is handling access to all http services first, with Pound handling the management of the backend servers.

There really wasn't much need for Apache httpd, as we don't use most of it's features and without tuning, it takes up a lot of memory just to do rewrites, http proxy for the backends and logging.

Squid uses much less memory, and is very fast. Kagesenshi is working on tighter integration with Cachefu for the Plone sites. Even without that, you will find that sites like http://foss.org.my are now snappy (1.02 seconds total according to firebug). It's improved the speed of http://mirror.inigo-tech.com also which is a slow external USB drive.

The performance bottleneck now is actually memory. While FreeBSD's virtual memory does an awesome job (we're using 1201MB of swap at time of writing), we are now running 4 separate virtual servers, each running it's own self contained services. Not much more we can optimize now. Long idle processes of course, take several seconds to swap back in. So adding another 1GB of memory (total 2GB) will give quite a bit of breathing space and get rid of that lag.

For those that are curious, all this including http://www.apdip.net which used to sit it's own server is running on RM2.5K worth of hardware.