Wow. I mean, wow. So I decided last night it'd be a good opportunity to continue expanding on my knowledge of optimizing web applications for speed by purchasing a new server. Max is pretty skeptical about what I'm looking to do, but we'll see. In any case, the primary *nix environment we work on at MindTouch is Debian. I guess I've grown pretty accustomed to the ease that is apt-get.

A brief history: My servers have always used some flavor of RedHat (or Fedora). So I used to use up2date (eh, sorta crap), then I got lazy and installed cPanel, which did a lot of that for me. The server I ordered today was CentOS (a Fedora flavor) and BOY, was I lost while I stumbled my way across CentOS. My server company told me Debian would cost $150/hour to install, so I said screw that and ended up getting FreeBSD instead.

Christ, FreeBSD is a pain in the ass, too! Every system seems to have its own little quirks, which is annoying (to say the least). No wonder Linux adoption sucks so bad - you're pretty much stuck on whatever system you work with first, regardless of how crappy it is! It's like the imprinting of birds ...

Rant aside, I'm experimenting with Lighttpd this weekend and its performance against Apache for serving up static content. I don't expect it to be too meaningful, but we'll see.