Lighttpd

Hello Team

My system details:

CPU: 2x xeon e5620 2.4ghz
RAM: 16gb ddr3
HDD: ssd ocz agility2 over raid10
O/S: red hat enterprise 5
Internet: bt 500mbps 1:1 uncontended

I'm extremely impressed with lighttpd's content delivery on plain text but when SSL is enabled there is an extreme delay (4-15s to display hello).

The main folder is /var/www/lighttpd/ and I have a virtual host with its document root as /var/www/test1/. Both folders contain only 1 file that has the following contents:

Hello

This had me so estranged so I investigated further and found the total CPU load barely reaches 5% and total RAM usage is around 9% so I'm thinking maybe it's something to do with the configuration file (which is just a basic setup)? Can anyone shed some insight on this please?

lighttpd.conf

server.modules              = (
                                "mod_access",
                                "mod_fastcgi",
                                "mod_accesslog" )

server.document-root        = "/var/www/lighttpd/" 
server.errorlog             = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log" 
index-file.names            = ( "index.php", "index.html",
                                "index.htm", "default.htm" )

mimetype.assign             = (
  ".rpm"          =>      "application/x-rpm",
  ".pdf"          =>      "application/pdf",
  ".sig"          =>      "application/pgp-signature",
  ".spl"          =>      "application/futuresplash",
  ".class"        =>      "application/octet-stream",
  ".ps"           =>      "application/postscript",
  ".torrent"      =>      "application/x-bittorrent",
  ".dvi"          =>      "application/x-dvi",
  ".gz"           =>      "application/x-gzip",
  ".pac"          =>      "application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig",
  ".swf"          =>      "application/x-shockwave-flash",
  ".tar.gz"       =>      "application/x-tgz",
  ".tgz"          =>      "application/x-tgz",
  ".tar"          =>      "application/x-tar",
  ".zip"          =>      "application/zip",
  ".mp3"          =>      "audio/mpeg",
  ".m3u"          =>      "audio/x-mpegurl",
  ".wma"          =>      "audio/x-ms-wma",
  ".wax"          =>      "audio/x-ms-wax",
  ".ogg"          =>      "application/ogg",
  ".wav"          =>      "audio/x-wav",
  ".gif"          =>      "image/gif",
  ".jar"          =>      "application/x-java-archive",
  ".jpg"          =>      "image/jpeg",
  ".jpeg"         =>      "image/jpeg",
  ".png"          =>      "image/png",
  ".xbm"          =>      "image/x-xbitmap",
  ".xpm"          =>      "image/x-xpixmap",
  ".xwd"          =>      "image/x-xwindowdump",
  ".css"          =>      "text/css",
  ".html"         =>      "text/html",
  ".htm"          =>      "text/html",
  ".js"           =>      "text/javascript",
  ".asc"          =>      "text/plain",
  ".c"            =>      "text/plain",
  ".cpp"          =>      "text/plain",
  ".log"          =>      "text/plain",
  ".conf"         =>      "text/plain",
  ".text"         =>      "text/plain",
  ".txt"          =>      "text/plain",
  ".dtd"          =>      "text/xml",
  ".xml"          =>      "text/xml",
  ".mpeg"         =>      "video/mpeg",
  ".mpg"          =>      "video/mpeg",
  ".mov"          =>      "video/quicktime",
  ".qt"           =>      "video/quicktime",
  ".avi"          =>      "video/x-msvideo",
  ".asf"          =>      "video/x-ms-asf",
  ".asx"          =>      "video/x-ms-asf",
  ".wmv"          =>      "video/x-ms-wmv",
  ".bz2"          =>      "application/x-bzip",
  ".tbz"          =>      "application/x-bzip-compressed-tar",
  ".tar.bz2"      =>      "application/x-bzip-compressed-tar",
  ""              =>      "application/octet-stream",
 )

accesslog.filename          = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log" 

url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )

$HTTP["url"] =~ "\.pdf$" {
  server.range-requests = "disable" 
}

static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

server.port                = 443

server.bind                = "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" 

server.pid-file            = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid" 

server.username            = "lighttpd" 

server.groupname           = "lighttpd" 

fastcgi.server             = ( ".php" =>
                               ( "localhost" =>
                                 (
                                   "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket",
                                   "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi" 
                                 )
                               )
                            )

ssl.engine                 = "enable" 
ssl.pemfile                = "/path/to/ssl/file/lighttpd/host.pem" 

include_shell "find /etc/lighttpd/conf.d -maxdepth 1 -name '*.conf' -exec cat {} \;" 

$HTTP["host"] == "test1.mydomain.com" {
        ssl.pemfile = "/path/to/ssl/files/lighttpd/test1/host.pem" 
           server.document-root        = "/var/www/test1" 
}

4 seconds to load a 5 byte file off 1 thread? What happens when there's 2 people? 10 people? 100 people? If this is a known issue or if anyone else has had similar experiences but never figured out a way to fix it please let me know. If it's not ready for corporate delivery I'd leave it for now and play around with it in my spare time