Hi guys, just started using my Linode 360! I've read a lot off good stuff about Linode and decided to move here. It's great being a part of this community!

Now, has anyone tried installing the Cherokee Web Server on any distro on Linode? If so, how do you install it and do you have some tuning tips or good-to-know tweaks?

Thanks!

Seems to have been in Ubuntu for a long time:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=cherokee

so the command would be:

sudo apt-get install cherokee

James

Well, both the Hardy and Intrepid packages are 2 years old. Even the Jaunty package is not up-to-date.

I'll try to compile it from source but I just wanted get some advices about how to do that with optimal performance.

Thanks anyway!

Ok I've just found up-to-date packages on launchpad. I'll try it out and write about my experiences in case anyone ever needs it.

https://launchpad.net/~cherokee-webserver/+archive

Update after a day-long trial&error with Cherokee:

The server itself compiles correctly, leaving configure parameters at the defaults doesn't do much harm. Binding PHP into it was also relatively easy.

The problem started when I wanted to use additional php modules. I've tried both GD and APC, no luck. They got installed correctly, but the php-cgi installation doesn't seem to recognize them. Modifying /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini with "extension=gdi.so" (or the lines for APC) was also a dead end.

At this point I've stopped digging into this. If anyone knows how to fix this, feel free to share.

Are you editing the wrong file or was that just a typo? If you want to enables PHP modules with CGI/FastCGI, you need to edit /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

Oops, sorry that was a typo. Thanks for pointing that out, I've corrected the original post.

That was such a pain when I was configuring my php.ini for lighttpd. I had to run a phpinfo to figure out where it was being read from. They really need to go back to just using /etc/phpV/php.ini again.

How is the Cherokee web server working out? I've read lots of good things about it, but I'm a lighttpd fan.

Well, APC finally seems to be working (sort of) with Cherokee, still no luck with GD though. Plus I'm missing the mod_rewrite functionality of Apache. Although URL rewriting with regex is supported, the functionality is not even close to what Apache offers.

I'll keep experimenting with Cherokee though. If I can get it fully functional I'll run my own benchmarks and see if it's really that better than the competition.

So, I gotta ask - please don't take this the wrong way, but I truly am curious: Why Cherokee and not Apache? Personally, I hadn't ever heard of Cherokee before, so I know nothing about it.

I just ask because Apache is readily available, and you seem to be familiar with it - I'm willing to bet you could have it up, running and tuned within a half day.

Well, I do know my way around with Apache. But I still like to experiment. I've ran into Cherokee a few months ago and the benchmarks on their site seemed impressing. I'm now trying to find out if their claims are true.

Again, I'm testing it just of curiosity. I really haven't tested it that throughly though, I'm still far away from even considering a switch to Cherokee.

Thanks for the reply - do post your results here if you don't mind. I'd be interested in seeing the results.

Sure, it'll be my pleasure. I'll post back when I make some significant progress.

You should take the benchmarks on their web page with a grain of salt.

A commenter on the blog that posted the 0.10.0 benchmarks originally pointed out that e.g. the nginx configuration is far from optimal (only one process serving requests).