lighttpd
lighttpd (pronounced lighty) is a secure, fast, compliant and
very flexible open source web server which has been optimized for
speed-critical environments. It has a very
low memory footprint compared to other web servers and takes care of
cpu-load.
Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth,
Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd a
suitable web server software for every server that has
load problems, or for serving static media separately from
dynamic content.
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.
Lighttpd also supports WebDNA, a server-side
scripting, interpreted language with an embedded database system,
specifically designed for the web. It is a popular web
server for the Catalyst and Ruby on Rails web frameworks.
lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites including
YouTube, wikipedia and meebo. Its high speed io-infrastructure allows
them to scale several times
better with the same hardware than with alternative web servers.
Features include:
- HTTP/1.0
- HTTP/1.1
- Ranges (start-end, start-, -end, multiple ranges)
- HTTP/1.0 Keep-Alive + HTTP/1.1 persistent Connections
- Methods: GET, HEAD, POST
- Last-Modified + If-Modified handling
- Sends Content-Length if possible
- Sends Transfer-Encoding: chunk, if Content-Length is not
possible
- Sends Content-Type
- On-the-fly output compression (deflate, gzip)
- Authentication: basic and digest
- HTTP
- CGI/1.1
- FastCGI
- Parses the Response-header and completes the HTTP-header
accordingly
- Keep-Alive handling based on Content-Length header
- Load balancing FastCGI, SCGI and HTTP proxy
support (one webserver distributes requests to multiple
PHP-servers via FastCGI))
- chroot support
- select()-/poll()-/epoll() based web server
- Support for more efficient event notification schemes like
kqueue and epoll
- Conditional rewrites (mod_rewrite)
- TLS/SSL with SNI support, via OpenSSL
- Directory listings
- 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
- HTTP compression using mod_compress and the newer
mod_deflate
- URL-Rewriting
- HTTP-Redirection
- Output-compression with transparent caching
- Light-weight (less than 1 MB)
- Single-process design with only several threads. No
processes or threads started per connection
- Custom error pages (for Response-Code 400-599)
- PHP support:
- Same speed as or faster than Apache + mod_php4
- Handles various PHP bugs in the FastCGI SAPI
- Includes a utility to spawn FastCGI processes
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Last Updated Monday, December 24 2012 @ 07:55 AM EST
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