* Lighttdp open source Web server
Just when you think that a particular type of product can’t get better someone builds a better mousetrap. So given the amount of effort and money put into the development of Web servers you’d think that a better Web server would be hard to produce. But, you’d be wrong.
Lighttdp, a high-performance open source Web server (licensed under the revised BSD license) was developed by Jan Kneschke as a distraction from his PhD thesis.
The challenge Kneschke took up was how to handle 10,000 connections in parallel on one Web server and his method was to optimize and remove redundant operations wherever possible. The result was Lighttpd.
Lighttpd is an IPv4 and IPv6 compatible Web server that understands HTTP/1.0 and 1.1, HTTPS (using OpenSSL) CGI/1.1, native FastCGI, and HTTP authentication. It allows for virtual hosts, directory listings, streaming CGI and FastCGI, URL-Rewriting, HTTP-Redirects, output-compression with transparent caching, automatic expiration of files and has Large File support.
Lighttpd is very PHP focused. It provides the same speed or better than apache + mod_php4 and handles various PHP bugs in the FastCGI SAPI.
Lighttpd’s security features include chroot(), set UID, set GID, docroot protection, and strict HTTP-header parsing. Other features include on-the-fly output-compression with transparent caching (deflate, gzip, bzip2), authentication support, fast and secure application controlled downloads, Server Side Includes, and user tracking.
While this list of features is impressive, where Lighttpd really stands out is raw performance. By way of example: When the Web site Textdrive was slashdotted its Apache server reached a queue depth of 400 pending requests and used 2.1G bytes of memory. Textdrive switched over to Lighttpd and the queue dropped to 4 pending requests and the memory usage decreased to 0.5G-byte.
A really impressive feature of Lighttpd is its scheme for load balancing: Using a minimal FastCGI-daemon that supports PHP and able to run on any host, Lighttpd acts as a load-balancing front-end.
To date Lighttpd has been successfully ported to Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and IRIX. If Textdrive’s experience is anything to go by, Lighttpd is a serious contender for any high volume production environment.
