Raspbian (Debian) LAMP with WEBMIN, SAMBA and FTP on the RPi

RPi Web Server not as Hungry on Resources as Expected

I now have my Raspberry Pi Model B Revision 2.0 running a fork of Debian called Raspbian, configured as a LAMP server. I added Samba and Webmin so I could access the web files, and use a web interface to monitor, control, and update the RPi from remote. Also added was FTP, although I am not certain this is necessary since Samba was installed.

webmin's front end status page served via my RPi

All works very well! I have served up my first web page and plan to have a lot of fun with that.

I initially thought about using Cherokee in place of Apache because of its reduced foot print and faster speeds. After researching it further though, I decided to stick with my old friend Apache. Cherokee is still fairly new by comparison so the community would be smaller. And I viewed a few comparisons showing its performance gains to be minimal.

Updating is really slow, but then we are using a single core 700 MHz processor. It is easy to see the difference between this hardware and perhaps a dated laptop, but then you think about how you are even making a comparison at all. Something this small running this type of software, and successfully!!

I killed the GUI via the raspi-config option for booting to the command line, and changed the memory allocated to the GPU to zero. Webmin (see image above) shows just a hair over 25% RAM usage.

Serving up files and web pages turned out to be necessary for my projects. I needed to be able to interact with my RPi without keyboard, video, and mouse, and a web interface is perfect for that. This will be the next stage of the project development. If all goes well, I will have this first device time lapse recording the perseid meteor shower Sunday night, Monday morning, and have the movie encoded and ready for download on my home network.

When I write something a little more functional for front page of the RPi's web interface, I will run a simple Apache AB on it and share the results on my next blog entry.

More when I code it. =)