Hi, which web server software is the fastest and not that resource hogging when it comes to serving dynamic pages, aka PHP files? Also, it should be able to be integrated with cPanel, if possible Thanks.
lighttpd is by far the most efficient web server to date. Sites that share lots of static content, such as Youtube, Sourceforge and even Wikipedia make use of it. Only catch is that it isn't supported by Cpanel
The only interchangeable one that I know of it LiteSpeed. As "good" as it is, it's not free (well, there is a free version but it has a 5 vHost limit) and not open source.
I agree. I'm using lighty on my VPS almost for a year now and satisfied with its overall performance. I've searched a lot before I decided to use lighty and, almost every article I read, it's been told that "if your intention is to serve mostly static files; use lighty (like Wikipedia and Youtube), if your web page have mainly dynamic content; go with Apache". Although I have dynamic content on my pages, I've choosen lighty because of its minimal memory footprint fits my 256 megs VPS
Well, the thing is that lighttpd uses fast-cgi for the PHP which means that, theoretically, you can get better performance than an Apache server as the PHP is seperated from the web server.
Here is a very useful article about comparison of different methods for running PHP on a server; Running PHP on Shared Hosting (mentions the performance in 2nd section).
I can't upgrade to CentOS 5 unfortunately, and I'm again considering Lighttpd, I was thinking along the lines of relixx. Theory