lighttpd

Original author(s)	Jan Kneschke
Developer(s)	Lighttpd Developers
Initial release	March 2003 (2003-03)
Stable release	1.4.30 / December 18, 2011 (2011-12-18) [±]
Preview release	1.5.0 / February 3, 2007 (2007-02-03) [±]
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	Web server
License	BSD
Website	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.^{[citation needed]} 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.

Premise

The low memory footprint (compared to other web servers)^{[citation needed]}, small CPU load and speed optimizations 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. It runs natively on Unix-like operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

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 the 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.

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 (but not server-side CGI )
• 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.

Limitations

Lighttpd officially does not support sending large files from CGI, FastCGI, or proxies unless X-Sendfile is used.

Usage

Lighttpd is used by a number of high-traffic websites, among them are Meebo, YouTube, and SourceForge. Wikimedia also runs Lighttpd servers . 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. Lighttpd currently holds fifth place on the Netcraft "Web Server Survey" (November 2010).

See also

• Comparison of web server software
• Traffic Server
• Web accelerator which discusses host-based HTTP acceleration
• Proxy server which discusses client-side proxies
• Reverse proxy which discusses origin-side proxies
• Internet Cache Protocol

External links

• Project Web site
• lighttpd at Freecode
• OpenVMS Lighttpd project
• #lighttpd on freenode
• Complete guide to setup your server with Lighttpd, PHP5, MySQL, e-mail, firewall etc.
• Running Django on Lighttpd via FastCGI
• Older Lighttpd for Windows builds
• Guide to setup Lighttpd MySQL Php Wordpress DNS Ubuntu from scratch on Rackspace Cloud instance

WLMP

• Lighty2Go Portable LightTPD, MySQL & PHP (LiMP) Project
• yPortableWS Portable WLMP Project (requires .NET Framework)
• WLMP Project - lighttpd builds for Windows