Lighttpd: Information from Answers.com

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lighttpd

Developer(s)	Jan Kneschke
Initial release	March 2003 (2003-03)
Stable release	1.4.24 _[+/−]
Preview release	1.5.0 _[+/−]
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	Web server
License	BSD
Website	Official site

lighttpd (usually pronounced "Light-TPD", abbreviated "Lighty") is a web server designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. It was originally written by the German programmer Jan Kneschke (who also works for MySQL) as a proof-of-concept of the c10k problem (how to handle 10000 connections in parallel on one server),^[1] but now has substantial worldwide popularity.^[2]

1 Premise
2 Features
- 2.1 Application support
3 Usage
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

Premise

Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software/open source, and is distributed under the BSD license. lighttpd runs on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows (under Cygwin). On Windows it can be controlled with the program Lighty Tray which integrates into the system tray.^[3]

Features

Load-balancing FastCGI, SCGI and HTTP proxy support
chroot support
select()-/poll()-/epoll() based web server
Support for more efficient event notification schemes like kqueue and epoll
Conditional rewrites (mod_rewrite)
SSL and TLS support, via OpenSSL.
Authentication against an LDAP server
RRDtool statistics
Rule-based downloading with possibility of a script handling only authentication
Server Side Includes support (broken [1])
Flexible virtual hosting
Modules support
Cache Meta Language (currently being replaced by mod_magnet) using the Lua programming language
Minimal WebDAV support
Servlet (AJP) support (in versions 1.5.x and up)
HTTP compression using mod_compress and the newer mod_deflate (1.5.x)
Light-weight (less than 1 MB)
Single-process design with only several threads. No processes or threads started per connection.

Application support

lighttpd supports the FastCGI, SCGI and CGI interfaces to external programs, permitting web applications written in any programming language to be used with this server. As a particularly popular language, PHP performance has received special attention. Lighttpd's FastCGI can be configured to support PHP with opcode caches (like APC) properly and efficiently. Additionally, it has received attention from its popularity within the Python, Perl, Ruby and Lua communities. It is a popular web server for the Catalyst and Ruby on Rails web frameworks. Lighttpd does not support ISAPI.

Usage

Lighttpd is used by some of the biggest websites, including sites such as meebo. Wikimedia runs Lighttpd servers ^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7] as does SourceForge.^[7] Three of the most famous torrent listing websites, The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt, which have more than 1,000 hits per second, also use Lighttpd.^[8] Lighttpd currently holds fifth place on the Netcraft "Web Server Survey" (November 2008).^[9] Lighttpd has not placed in the June 2009 survey except under the "Market Share for Top Servers Across the Million Busiest Sites" survey where it places sixth. ^[10]