Lighttpd – the little sister of the server family

If Apache were the dad and Nginx the eldest son then Lighty would be the little sister of the server family. Dad is old but reliable, the son is strong but doesn’t know everything while the sister is little and sidelined but she is good at school and has learnt to play the piano. Let’s see how this analogy works out.

For starters either of these servers work absolutely fine under most circumstance. Nginx and lighttpd seem to handle high volumes of concurrent connections better while Apache has the history and features galore. The thing is being new and a small company with limited resources doesn’t help the causes of lighttpd at all which is sad. This article is a compilation of what people think about Lighttpd rather than my own opinions.

What is Lighttpd?

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility — all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it’s Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.
-Official Site: www.lighttpd.net

Lighttpd (pronounced “lighty”) is an open-source web server more optimized for speed-critical environments than common products while remaining standards-compliant, secure and flexible. It was originally written by Jan Kneschke as a proof-of-concept of the c10k problem – how to handle 10,000 connections in parallel on one server, but has gained worldwide popularity.
-Wikipedia: www.wikipedia.org/lighttpd

Lighttpd How tos…

This is a sexy looking site. Check it out…
https://calomel.org/lighttpd.html

One more which includes known issues with Lighttpd
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Lighttpd

Also Read : The Battle of the Web Servers: Apache Vs Nginx Vs Lighttpd

Installation Guide
http://nas-tweaks.net/88/installation-and-configuration-of-the-webserver-lighttpd-for-fonz-fun_plug/

http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/1/wiki/TutorialLighttpdAndPHP

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/installing-and-configuring-lighttpd-webserver-howto.html

Web server benchmark PHP – Apache vs Nginx vs Lighttpd
http://philbayfield.com/2010/10/02/web-server-benchmark-php-apache-vs-nginx-vs-lighttpd/

Who uses lighttpd?

This link has a list of hundreds of users some of which are Youtube and Isohunt.
http://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/12/28/lighttpd-powers-5-alexa-top-250-sites/

Why is lighttpd better than Apache or Nginx?

http://blog.cppcms.com/post/99