I've been thinking about my needs for a webserver and seeing as how I'm
only going to be serving static pages I want to concentrate on speed and
simplicity. In my scenario I'll have a set of pages that aren't going to
change, and if they do, taking down the server would be okay. My question
is then:
Is there a webserver that, when started, reads all pages into memory and
then never touches the disk again? Would a similar effect be better
achieved with something like Apache + memcached? Other suggestions?
You're thinking way too hard. As long as you have enough RAM, your operating system will cache data; so you don't need to do anything fancy at all. Set up whatever web server you like, in the default configuration, and measure its performance; odds are that you'll find that you don't need to tune anything at all.