(Strange post, so hopefully this won't be as strange a reply).
On the subject of security flaws: it is considered general bad practice to store cgi-bin scripts within the document root of the web server. Even the W3C eludes to it under "Are compiled languages such as C safer ..." in their World Wide Web Security FAQ:
Consider the following scenario. For convenience's sake, you've decided
to identify CGI scripts to the server
using the .cgi extension. Later on,
you need to make a small change to an
interpreted CGI script. You open it up
with the Emacs text editor and modify
the script. Unfortunately the edit
leaves a backup copy of the script
source code lying around in the
document tree. Although the remote
user can't obtain the source code by
fetching the script itself, he can now
obtain the backup copy by blindly
requesting the URL:
http://your-site/a/path/your_script.cgi~
(This is another good reason to limit
CGI scripts to cgi-bin and to make
sure that cgi-bin is separate from the
document root.)
This is not as significant a threat as the ability to write a file within the document root. However, an attacker could obtain the source code of the cgi, devise a directed attack against it, and use it as a stepping stone into the server.
To mitigate this, you can add the following lines to the lighttpd.conf (or some variation therein) to direct cgi-bin to a directory separate from the /var/www/lighttpd document root.
$HTTP["url"] =~ "/cgi-bin/" { cgi.assign = ( "" => "" ) }
alias.url = ( "/cgi-bin/" => "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/" )
This requires both the cgi and alias modules for lighttpd.
You should perform stress testing using one of load testing tools. I recommend using siege
, JMeter
or Tsung
.
siege
is the simplest one and it should suit your needs since you don't need complex testing scenarios.
Best Answer
Not much.
Here's a great paper that describes how a micro's performance compared to a Nokia N900 smart phone.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amazon_ec2_micro&num=1
The NET was that micros are very low end and can give irregular performance results.