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The author Nginx, Igor Sysoev, mentioned lighttpd as the nearest competitor to Nginx. I don't really keep up with webservers, what is the story behind lighttpd

• SyK 17y ago
  I don't know about anyone else but I used to use lighty and followed the path I think most people would: Learning Apache, as it's a default, then using something faster to serve static files and proxy to Apache for content (Lighty, briefly), then experimenting with proxying directly to code with things like scgi, etc. I was at this point, playing with Lighty as an alternative, when nginx first starting poking its head about. After trying one installation of it, it was so much quicker and smoother that I basically instantly ditched any ideas of bothering with much else. Then you start running sites with any real traffic, where it's more stable than anything I've ever seen, with no real effort and it makes the amount of bs that goes into lighty look ridiculous. So I guess "the story" is it targets the same niche, and it's better. Bonus being that the deeper you go or the heavier into that niche you are, the wider the margin is.
• rlpb 17y ago
  lighttpd had a memory leak that was around unfixed for a very long time. Googling couldn't tell me whether it was now fixed or not, but there are many references to it (take a look!). It did strike me as a problem that an essential bug like that wasn't looked at quickly, even if it was a little difficult to pin down. Perhaps this is a bit unfair, but this is what led me to move over to nginx from lighttpd.
  • eli 17y ago
    I've been using lighttpd for static files for a few years and never had any problems. It's faster and less resource intensive than Apache, and it's literally never crashed.