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Lighttpd, fast-cgi & PHP can do quite a wonderful setup that can handle significant load. You can have many layers of load balancing & fail-over. Here is a three-layer approach. A dedicated load balancer directs many web servers. Each web server (lighttpd) delegates the processing of dynamic to multiple application servers (fast-cgi).

Configurations

Check out the lighttpd config for mod_fastcgi. In this case, we want only load-balance a single controller PHP file that is called heavily. We also let the webserver be the appserver itself for the moment and become a dedicated one if it becomes overloaded. All other regular PHP requests are served by the localhost (webserver). Add this into your lighttpd.conf: fastcgi.server = ( "/popular.php"=> ( ("socket"=>"/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket", "bin-path"=>"/usr/bin/php-cgi", "min-procs"=>2, "max-procs"=>4, "bin-environment"=>("PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN"=>"10","PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS"=>"5000") ), ("host"=>"123.123.123.123", "port"=>81, "check-local"=>"disable", "disable-time"=>30 ) ), ".php"=> ( ("socket"=>"/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket", "bin-path"=>"/usr/bin/php-cgi", "min-procs"=>1, "max-procs"=>2, "bin-environment"=>("PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN"=>"5","PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS"=>"1000") ) ) ) To start the fast-cgi processes on the application servers: spawn-fcgi -p 81 -a 123.123.123.123 -f /usr/bin/php-cgi -u lighttpd -g lighttpd -C 5 -P /var/run/spawn-fcgi-81.pid