lighttpd

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility -- all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.

Web 2.0

lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites like 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.

This fast web server and its development team create a web-server with the needs of the future web in mind:

Its event-driven architecture is optimized for a large number of parallel connections (keep-alive) which is important for high performance AJAX applications.


News

1.4.20 - Otherwise the terrorists win

September 30th, 2008

After two prereleases and a lot of bugfixing, we are proud to announce a new release of the 1.4 branch: 1.4.20 is finally out. We would like to thank everybody who tested the prereleases and/or reported bugs in our ticket system. Please pay special attention to the security announcements:

Download

  • lighttpd-1.4.20.tar.gz
    (sha1sum: 61790c02d9e96c3cb23ffd3907f1caee64c475dd
    md5sum: 7ce7eefb487682b61d9b06b41864c64a)
  • lighttpd-1.4.20.tar.bz2
    (sha1sum: e5944a40579e0f37c6a0eeb0ad751344b2d6006c
    md5sum: ed6ee0bb714f393219a32768d86984d8)
Read the rest of this entry

1.4.19 - Made in Germany

March 10th, 2008

Long time no see.

It has been almost half a year since 1.4.18. 6months. Jan has been working on many interesting features for 1.5. [1] Currently he ports it to glib2.

But back to 1.4.19. Yes again the release date was nailed down by a few security bugs. *cough* Nevertheless we got a ton of other nice bugfixes. All praise our new lighttpd hero Stefan Bühler. Big thank you from my side. (darix)

Download

  • lighttpd-1.4.19.tar.gz
    (sha1sum: 79e2d61dd9017c3c50c0fe98b2289cae5c1255ee
    md5sum: cede410e7adee3ea14206749190a8b5d     )
  • lighttpd-1.4.19.tar.bz2
    (sha1sum: fd4450e7faae55ebe0905114722995b0c57397cc
    md5sum: d787374e4e4aaa09d5cfa9ab9d23ad40    )
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Mono + FastCGI

January 23rd, 2008

Reggie pointed me to the FastCGI support for Mono. For our lighttpd they have a full featured page that should cover all possible configuration needs.

Feel free to try it out and comment on this article if it works as expected.

Giving Solaris some love

October 28th, 2007

Weekend time is hacking time. This weekend it is about getting 1.5.0 running nicely on Solaris and making sure lighttpd is a first class citizen there.

All tests successful (1 subtest UNEXPECTEDLY SUCCEEDED), 88 subtests skipped.
Files=22, Tests=324, 60 wallclock secs ( 1.98 cusr +  1.03 csys =  3.01 CPU)
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Powered by Lighttpd

April 4th, 2007

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.

One example is YouTube. They have a farm of servers which push out the thumbnails you see before you see the movies:

$ curl -I http://sjl-static16.sjl.youtube.com/vi/TgF_eRkfqEY/2.jpg
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: image/jpeg
ETag: "983726135810477085"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Fri, 03 Feb 2006 04:32:53 GMT
Content-Length: 3495
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:49:51 GMT
Server: lighttpd-aio/1.4.11.8

As you see in the name-scheme, there are some more of those servers pushing out content.

On wikipedia they run at least 2 servers with lighttpd:

  • upload.wikimedia.org
  • download.wikimedia.org

While download is used to distribute the SQL dumps of the database when tend to grow above the magic 4GByte border, upload is used to push out all the images and resize them when necessary.

$ curl -I http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Mandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg/250px-Mandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: image/jpeg
ETag: "6460328581220324712"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:24:53 GMT
Content-Length: 5973
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:16:19 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.13
X-Cache: HIT from sq13.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from sq13.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: HIT from knsq12.knams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from knsq12.knams.wikimedia.org:3128
Age: 6265
X-Cache: HIT from knsq10.knams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from knsq10.knams.wikimedia.org:80
Via: 1.0 sq13.wikimedia.org:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE12), 1.0 knsq12.knams.wikimedia.org:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE12), 1.0 knsq10.knams.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE12)
Connection: close