lighttpd

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lighttpd
Developed by Jan Kneschke
Initial release  ?
Stable release 1.4.19 [+/−]
Preview release 1.5.0 [+/−]
Written in C
OS Cross-platform
Available in English
Genre Web server
License BSD licenses
Website Official site

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

  • Load-balancing FastCGI, SCGI and HTTP-proxy support
  • 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)
  • 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 Ruby on Rails and Lua communities.

[edit] Usage

Lighttpd is used by some of the biggest websites, including sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and meebo, due to its optimization for serving large files. Wikimedia uses Lighttpd for some of its services [1][2] as does SourceForge[3][2]. 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.[4]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wikimedia web servers. Wikimedia wikitech-l mailing list (2008-02-12). Retrieved on 2008-02-12.
  2. ^ a b Powered by Lighttpd. The official site (2007-04-04). Retrieved on 2008-03-27. “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”
  3. ^ Sourceforge site on Lighttpd. almostserio.us. Retrieved on 2008-02-12.
  4. ^ Fly Light With Lighttpd Web Server. ServerWatch. Retrieved on 2008-02-12.

[edit] See also

Free software Portal

[edit] External links

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