lighttpd
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
lighttpd (pronounced "lighty") is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments.
Contents
[edit] Premise
Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its 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). Under Windows, it can be controlled using the standalone program Lighty Tray.
[edit] Features
chroot support select()-/poll()-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 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)[edit] 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 Perl, Ruby and Lua communities. It is a popular web server for the Catalyst and Ruby on Rails web frameworks. Note that Lighttpd does not support ISAPI.
[edit] Usage
Lighttpd is used by some of the biggest websites, including sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and meebo. Wikimedia uses Lighttpd for some of its services [1][2][3][4] as does SourceForge[5][4]. 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.[6]

