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.
Premise
The low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), 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 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.
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.
Usage
Lighttpd is used by a number of high-traffic websites, among them
Meebo and
YouTube.
Wikimedia runs Lighttpd servers
as does
SourceForge.
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
References
External links
Project Web site
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
Category:Free software programmed in C
Category:Free web server software