So I have 2 IP Addresses, and running apache on ipaddress #1 (www.server.com). What I was thinking, was pointing static.server.om to ipaddress #2, and running lighthttpd for images and javascript.
Does this sound normal? I want to make sure my images and javascript are served quickly and cookieless.
If you use a diffferent domain name, or a subdomain, and (assuming barebones) no php / no session_autostart, there should be no cookies. It's pretty much Best-Current-Practice of the major sites (and even small ones), and works well.
I'm assuming you're looking to speed up your site -- the first, and most effective way (short of using a CDN) would be to have a subdomain or separate domain for your images. It doubles the pipelining bucket (since pipelines are per-FQDN). A great help.
Last, turn OFF compression on your image server; unless it's serving out pdfs or bloaty raw-files, you take a CPU hit and gain no bandwidth speed over trying to compress an already-highly-optimized file.
Hope this helps!
More or less, there's a big enough mix of options that everyone does it differently, but your example would work. "Normally" people put lighthttpd (or nginx more nowadays) in front of apache and have it proxy requests, but your setup is actually simpler if you have the second IP available.
The only thing I'd mention is you might want to make your static.server.com into a fully separate domain from www.server.com. Unless you're really disciplined about your cookies, some plugin or third party vendor code or who knows what is going to set *.server.com cookies and then browsers will wind up sending them to your static setup. If you go with static.server2.com you're immune.
