Turning Lighttpd access log off for performance
I took a look at the Lighttpd access log, which is actually more than 1 GB a day. This is completely useless, it’s taking lots of disk space and it’s far too big for me to ever run an analysis program on. Not only that but it’s only going to get worse!
As I’ve studied the performance of the server generally it’s pretty clear that it is very IO bound (although things can go a bit slow sometimes, the processors are always mostly idle). So writing a 1 GB log each day isn’t going to help.
I do want some stats so I enabled the statistics module which tells me that lighttpd is averaging about 60 hits per second (although right now it’s 75 hits per second).
Since I made the change I think that performance has improved a bit but it’s not been massively significant.
I am also considering moving Lighttpd off to another server completely, although it uses almost no CPU I think that it is using up IO bandwidth. I really need another server anyway but I’ll wait until the July promotions start at The Planet.