Ubuntu Minimal, Lighttpd, Perl CGI, PHP and & MySQL with Tiny Memory

The following setup is designed to provide a webserver with Perl, PHP and MySQL database, for Linux Ubuntu Server, that fits well inside 64MB of RAM. My tests with Ubuntu Dapper LTS Server and Ubuntu Hardy LTS Server show that it consumes less than 40MB of memory and uses up less than 400MB of disk space.

For comparison, doing this with default installs of Apache2 and MySQL5 instead, consumes more than 200MB of memory.

This is ideal for:

"Small memory", "low memory", "small RAM", "low RAM" situations
Cheap VPS hosting and other virtualised servers, such as under Xen or OpenVZ.
Test servers used by only one or two developers.
Hosting websites used by only half a dozen users.
Small databases with simple tables and only a few MB of data.
Making use of elderly hardware.

Caveats:

This is for a low-use server typically accessed by only half a dozen users.
Lighttpd is used instead of Apache or Apache2. You can read a quick Lighttpd configuration tutorial or the lighttpd.conf reference documentation.
Normal CGI is used instead of FastCGI with lighttpd- simply to save memory. My tests showed that FastCGI used a further 20MB of RAM.
The main cause for concern regarding performance is MySQL. The configuration shown below is magnitudes of scale below what the MySQL documenters consider a "small" install.
MySQL will go very slow if you try to perform complex queries or sort large volumes of data.
MySQL is configured to listen only on localhost. You will not be able to connect to MySQL remotely.
Anything approaching a Slashdotting, and your server will probably end up stone dead. Most likely, MySQL will hang first. If you need to weather heavy traffic, avoid using a database at all, or consider SQLite instead (built into PHP5). Lighttpd and PHP5 will probably survive quite well, up to a point.

Setup

First, install Ubuntu Server with minimal options.

Next, just issue the following commands:

sudo su - apt-get install lighttpd php5-cgi mysql-server-5.0 php5-mysql lighty-enable-mod cgi mv /etc/mysql/my.cnf /etc/mysql/my.cnf-orig cat <<! >/etc/mysql/my.cnf # Example MySQL config file for tiny systems # Main MySQL server options [mysqld] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # No locking at all! skip-locking # Set internal buffers, caches and stacks very low key_buffer = 16K max_allowed_packet = 16K table_cache = 1 sort_buffer_size = 16K read_buffer_size = 16K read_rnd_buffer_size = 1K net_buffer_length = 1K thread_stack = 16K # Don't listen on a TCP/IP port at all. # Will still work provided all access is done via localhost skip-networking server-id = 1 # Skip Berkley and Inno DB types #skip-bdb # BDB now deprecated 2011-02-04 skip-innodb # Set the query cache low query_cache_limit = 1048576 query_cache_size = 1048576 query_cache_type = 1 # Set various memory limits very low, disable memory-hogging extras [mysqldump] quick max_allowed_packet = 16K [mysql] no-auto-rehash [isamchk] key_buffer = 16K sort_buffer_size = 16K [myisamchk] key_buffer = 16K sort_buffer_size = 16K [mysqlhotcopy] interactive-timeout ! /etc/init.d/mysql restart /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart exit Update 2011-02-04: BDB is now deprecated, have commented out skip-bdb

Public Domain - Andrew Oakley - 2008-03-06

Top - More Computing Articles - Article Index - aoakley.com