Quote:
Originally Posted by JuicyBunny
Does strongbox prevent any of the free downloading capability? Or can people just reacharound? It seems to be preventing unless session is active..
We run mp4 for streaming and downloading on apache...
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Absolutely. Strongbox would take care of that. Running a site on a separate server
designed for tiny files (lighttpd) in order to serve very large files (videos) will make
very hard to integrateproper security between the two, though.
We ran the tests, though, ran the test, looked at the code, adjusted configuration -
there's simply absolutely no reason at all to run lighttpd on videos. As a matter of
fact, when serving videos, 99.999% of the time will be spent transferring the video
to the user. The roughly 12 milliseconds spent in server code is nothing compared
to the minutes spent transferring the video.
Consider this. Let's set up the best possible situation for lighttpd:
Let's just say that your server admin doesn't know about "noatime",
so Apache is correctly updating the atime while lighttpd falsifies it -
that's the situation where lighttpd can appear faster.
Let's say that let's lighttpd spends 15% less processing time that Apache.
Not that it actually does, but let's pretend we believe the lighttpd promoters.
Both servers run their processing, then hand it off to the OS to send the actual video via sendfile().
Let's say Apache is poorly configured so it spends 12 milliseconds processing before
handing it off to sendfile. At 15% less lighttpd saves 3 milliseconds, if you believe their claims.
Playing the video takes what, five minutes? Wow you've saved 3 milliseconds on a
five minute video! That'll sure help! That's a 0.0005% improvement. Wow.
Actually, though, by running two different web servers, they are competing for
resources such as cache RAM, so you've actually just knocked your performance down.
On the other hand, consider a thumbnail that only takes 10 milliseconds to transfer.
Saving a couple of milliseconds of processing time makes sense, there, if you
don't know to just friggin use the noatime setting.