Faster and lighter weight alternative to bitcoind on a server?

[PrintCoins]

Bitcoind is a hog on resources - memory, hard disk, and cpu. Especially if you are running on a little vps.

Does anyone have another suggestion as to something they actually use as an alternative to this.

I am looking for something:
* That can be easily interfaced with php
* doesn't require much if anything of the entire blockchain to be downloaded (something under 50 Meg would be great)
* Will not suck up much more memory than my apache server.
* Can still create new keys for itself and doesn't rely on some outside server to hold my private keys.
* Is easily set up from the command line in linux.
* Is fast and responsive.
* Is not something someone abandoned development on long ago.

[gmaxwell]

* Can still create new keys for itself and doesn't rely on some outside server to hold my private keys.

I think this is the only bullet you gave for something you actually want it to do, the rest were just operating constraints.  For this purpose you could use vanitygen or any of a large number of other totally offline tools.

If you actually want to, say, detect the reception of transactions— you might want to look into bitcoinj.

[jim618]

As gmaxwell suggests, you could make something from bitcoinj, perhaps as a servlet so that you can interface with PHP (suitably secured).

You would not need the GUI but to give you an idea of size, MultiBit runs easily in 100MB of RAM and the disk storage is 20ish MB for the blockchain. The wallets are small - I have had a few thousand keys in a wallet and it is around 1 MB.

[Nyhm]

I was also going to recommend a BitCoinJ solution. I'm a Java developer, and I've been doing a few things with it (such as VanillaWallet) and have found it to work well.

[PrintCoins]

Yep, I have been looking at bitcoinj, but was hoping not to have to roll a solution myself. Guess that this is just the facts, and it is time to get rolling.