John Disclaimer: I'm in the Drupal hosting business.
Performance all depends upon how you're using Drupal. Drupal can be used for brochure type sites where the content doesn't change much, and there's not a lot of additional modules installed or custom developed. Drupal can have numerous & custom modules installed, on a heavily used server, the bottle neck can be all that PHP code getting compiled. It's also possible Drupal is used for audio/video streaming, where network bandwidth may be the bottleneck. If your Drupal site has a ton of dynamic content, lots of nodes getting created, etc, the database could be a huge issue as well. What I'm getting to, it's very important to know how your site is being used, how Drupal is configured before jumping into what's best. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. :) Apache is the defacto standard when it comes to hosting Drupal. It's developed on Apache, tested on Apache, and just about all general hosting companies use the stock LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack that comes with their choice of OS. There are other web servers too - lighttpd ( I base my hosting images using lighttpd ), and Nginx is another. Apache is pretty much guaranteed to work, lots of hosting companies use it, but depending upon the type of hosting, performance tuning may not be allowed. By developing a comprehensive site benchmarking process that mimics the way your Drupal site is used, you can make changes to the webserver, PHP environment, and/or MySQL database to see the impact on site performance. Your site may reach a stage where you'll need separate web, database servers and require memcached, APC or using a content delivery network. Once you start playing with site performance, it's really a bunch of fun figuring it all out. Regards, Mark Schoonover -- http://www.thetajoin.com - The High Performance Drupal & SEO Proxy Hosting Company http://blog.thetajoin.com - Techneeks for High Performance Drupal Email: [email protected] :: Voice: 619-928-4473 :: Fax: 619-374-3130 On Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:06 -0400, "John Mitchell" <[email protected]> wrote: > What is the best web server to host drupal (like Apache, Apache > Tomcat, etc) as far as performance, security? > > Thanks, > > John > > -- > John J. Mitchell >
