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The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet)
Bill Lubanovic
investigates lighttpd on O'Reilly.
"Until recently, Apache didn't have a serious open source rival. In Netcraft's latest web server survey, we can see one emerging. As always, Apache has the top spot, Microsoft's IIS is second, and the ever-popular unknown is third. Fourth is Sun's Java Web Server (formerly known as ONE, formerly iPlanet, formerly Netscape). But at number five, serving about 1.4 million sites, is something called lighttpd. Where did that come from? We'll look into lighttpd's history, basic installation and configuration, and some visions of the future."
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The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 6, 2007 0:24 UTC (Fri) by larsl (guest, #44500) [Link] I've been spending time at work moving Rails apps away from lighttpd and putting them on mongrels behind Apache or Apache+Pound. I've found lighttpd to be pretty unreliable for RoR stuff, and it appears I'm not alone.
The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 6, 2007 5:10 UTC (Fri) by kmike (guest, #5260) [Link] You may want to look into nginx - another lightweight multiplexing web server/proxy, and also these resources about setting up the mongrel+nginx combo:http://kyledev.blogspot.com/search/label/nginx http://blog.kovyrin.net/2006/08/28/ruby-performance-results/
The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 6, 2007 10:29 UTC (Fri) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link] Nginx is great - if you can live more-or-less without documentation...
The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 6, 2007 15:04 UTC (Fri) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link] Lighty is kind of neat. It's easier to set up than apache and that can be huge.One point of correction, wikipedia claims (and here) to run on Apache and doesn't say anything about lighttpd. According to netcraft, youtube also runs apache and not lighttpd. Meebo and A List Apart both run lighttpd though; at least says netcraft.
The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 6, 2007 15:52 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] Such large sites may well run different parts on different servers. E.g. lighttpd may be used for serving static images and such unburdening the main apache servers which run the applications.
The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 6, 2007 21:49 UTC (Fri) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link] IIRC, the Wikimedia db dump download service runs on lighttpd, at least - but I'm not 100% sure, so don't quote me on that.
The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 7, 2007 9:29 UTC (Sat) by remijnj (subscriber, #5838) [Link] I think the article took the site names from this page which was linked from the latest netcraft survey page.
The lighttpd Web Server (O'ReillyNet) Posted Apr 6, 2007 15:58 UTC (Fri) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link] I wish I could feel better about lighttpd's security. The only published security hole was a bit sloppy, and it isn't obvious if the design takes security seriously (compared to, say, Postfix or Dovecot which has clear compartments and it's obvious where all the validation goes).
The web server is a very sensitive piece of equipment and the enormous code dump that is Apache always left me a bit uneasy, but at least it's in very common use and pretty throughly tested.
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