I finally had a chance to investigate an optimization which I've been wondering about for a while now - serving static files of a site from somewhere else. As a side, but related, experiment I also tested the claim that serving files from a static file server/separate domain/subdomain will speed things up because it results in browsers opening more concurrent requests than they would from a single domain.

For my tests I used lighttpd (pron. lighty) as a static file server for Apache. The idea is that lighttpd, which is acclaimed as being fast and light on memory, will serve the non-dynamic pages of the site (images, CSS, Javascript, etc), which should thereby help relieve Apache of some of its workload. This arrangement involves changing the paths, either on the backend or frontend, to these static resources so that they no longer get served by Apache.

The pieces
All tests took place on my Macbook Pro and involved two pages on a large Drupal 5 site running Pressflow. For the static file server itself, I installed lighttpd using Macports. Two separate pages of the site were tested, the smaller page's number of static files was in the category of 'average' for most sites. The larger page of the two, was very large - 39 CSS files, 23 Javascript files, and 46 image files.

Methods tested and benchmarked
I implemented and benchmarked the following methods of path modification in order to enable static file serving:

Categories: DrupalApacheperformancelighttpd