João Pinto Jerónimo's questions

My server is a Linode 512, and on it I run a Wordpress MU with 3 websites (they don't get a lot of visitors) and a couple of NodeJS apps.

I need to switch to Lighttpd because Apache 2 was using about 59% of the server's RAM, and now I have the php-cgi processes taking up about 43.6% of the server's RAM:

• most often 2 processes use 16.5% of the RAM each,
• 4 processes use 1.8% of the RAM each, and
• 4 more processes use 0,8% of the RAM, each

How can I have less of these processes ? I'm almost sure they're not all needed for the trafic this server gets...

I tried only allowing 2 children, but I still have those 10... This is my fastcgi.server section in lighttpd.conf.

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
                    ( "localhost" =>
                      (
                        "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket",
                        "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
                        "bin-environment" => (
                          "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "2",
                          "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "4000"
                         )
                      )
                    )
                  )

What else can I do to tune lighttpd to use less RAM ?

Suppose you're on dell.com right now and you're buying a server to run your MongoDB database for your small startup. You will have to handle literally tens of thousands of writes and reads per minute (but small objects). Would you go for 2 processors ? Invest more on RAM ?

I've heard (correct me if I'm wrong) MongoDB handles the most it can on the RAM and then flushes everything to the disk, in that case I should invest on a CPU with a large L2 cache, probably >40GB of RAM and a solid state drive.. right ?

Would I be better off with a high end (~$11,309, 2 expensive processors, 96GB of RAM) server or 2x(~$6,419, 2 expensive processors, 12GB of RAM) servers ?

Is Dell ok or do you have better sugestions ? (I'm outside the US, on Portugal)