Nope. lighttpd is simple and light. nginx is very powerful and fast. nginx could send static file with one syscall and zero-copy if OS supports it. It could e

Nope. lighttpd is simple and light. nginx is very powerful and fast. nginx could send static file with one syscall and zero-copy if OS supports it. It could exploit all system async mechanisms - POSIX AIO, kqueue, whatever you have. Linux was worst in this regards before io_uring, and FreeBSD or Solaris were much, much better platform for nginx. For example, Igor Sysoev (mastermide behind nginx) pushed patches to FreeBSD kernel to shave off one syscall per file on this system. Now, when everything is HTTPS, Linux have io_uring and Igor left nginx after F5 acquisition, it is not very useful - nginx is stagnating, support for KTLS is absent, support for io_uring on Linux is absent (though there are some forks and patches for this)... But compare nginx and lighttpd is simply stupid, it is apples-to-oranges comparison. Each one has its niche, of course.