Seeking advice on optimal server stack

[noobcakes]

Hello. I recently bought a Pogoplug series 4 and installed alarm on it. I've had fun so far playing around with settings, getting my IP set, etc. My goal for this box is to set up a web server for a small, personally managed website, but i think the usual Apache/MySQL/PHP stack is too resource-intensive for my purposes. All i need is a couple of pages with static content and a page or two that will fetch blog posts or whatever. I may also run a small forum for some friends, but nothing too big or high-traffic. I was planning on an email server, but it seems Comcast blocks the standard ports for POP3, IMAP, and their respective secure variants.

I'm looking at probably using lighttpd for my web server and sqlite as my SQL engine. Are these a good fit for the relatively dinky specs on the pogo series 4?

I'm also not quite sure what to do for my server's CGI. Everybody i know in software development says "please, please don't use PHP." I think i could handle using the language efficiently from a coding perspective, but i'm not sure if i should use a scripting language from a resources perspective. I know C/C++ would offer faster performance and lower memory footprint* at the cost of needing more coding work. Will such a drastic step be necessary, or would i probably be fine using Perl or Python without pushing my little black box to its limits?

*For the link, clicking any language on the bottom half of the screen will take you to a comparison page where you can select any two languages from the list. For all architectures listed, C wins almost across the board. Even PHP isn't so bad compared to other scripting languages, but compiled languages seem like the way to go.

[WarheadsSE]

You'd be surprised what you can do with fCGI, as it greatly cuts down on the disk read. Your best option within the 128M & 800hmz processor is to us lighttpd/nginx & some fCGI, no matter which it is. Catalyst might work, php-fpm, c++. You can also look into other languages with their own built-in http services.