Lighttpd

Infobox Software
name = lighttpd



caption =
developer = Jan Kneschke
released = ?
frequently_updated = yes
programming language = C
operating system = Cross-platform
language = English
genre = Web server
license = BSD licenses
website = [http://www.lighttpd.net Official site]

lighttpd (pronounced "lighty") is a web server designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments.

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.

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
* Flexible virtual hosting
* Modules support
* Cache Meta Language (currently being replaced by [http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/Docs:ModMagnet 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 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.

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 [cite web|url = http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-August/039208.html|title = Apache mod_php in wikipedia|publisher = Wikimedia wikitech-l mailing list| date = 2008-08-26| accessdate= 2008-08-27 |author=Brion Vibber] [cite web|url = http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-August/039211.html|title = Apache mod_php in wikipedia|publisher = Wikimedia wikitech-l mailing list| date = 2008-08-27| accessdate= 2008-08-27 |author=Tim Starling] [cite web|url = http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-August/039212.html|title = Apache mod_php in wikipedia|publisher = Wikimedia wikitech-l mailing list| date = 2008-08-27| accessdate= 2008-08-27 |author=Domas Mitzuas] cite web| url=http://www.lighttpd.net/2007/4/4/powered-by-lighttpd| title=Powered by Lighttpd| publisher=The official site| date=2007-04-04| quote=lighttpd is used by many well-known sites. The typical scenario is using lighttpd as off-load server to push out static content and leave to complex work to another server| accessdate=2008-03-27] as does SourceForge [cite web|url = http://www.almostserio.us/articles/2006/10/04/sourceforge-site-on-lighttpd| title = Sourceforge site on Lighttpd | publisher=almostserio.us| accessdate = 2008-02-12] . 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. [cite web|url = http://www.serverwatch.com/stypes/servers/article.php/17191_3678346|title = Fly Light With Lighttpd Web Server| publisher = ServerWatch | accessdate = 2008-02-12]

References

See also

* Comparison of web server software

External links

* [http://www.lighttpd.net Project Web site]
* [http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/lighttpd/ Freshmeat entry]
* [irc://irc.freenode.net/lighttpd #lighttpd] on freenode