Wisdom is the prime thing

I’ve been an Apache user for a while now. However, while researching some slowness problems with Apache proxies, I found out about some smaller web engines. One in particular caught my eye: lighttpd.

Testing it out, I was initially impressed with lighttpd’s (pronounced “lighty’s”) startup time and the speed of proxying. Reading up on it around the web, I learned that it has a good feature set and performs faster than even Apache for serving static files. It’s module layout is reminiscent of Apache’s, and the documentation has plenty of examples to get you started.

Configuring lighttpd

Primarily, I was impressed by the lighttpd configuration file. Setting up an Apache website, with virtual hosts, ssl support, php support, security, and so forth, is quite a job. Although there is plenty of documentation, and I am pretty experienced with it, I always approach the task with a bit of dread.

It was a completely different story with lighttpd. The configuration file is straightforward, with examples for most everything built into the file itself. I had a working server up in just a few minutes. The configuration file syntax makes it easy to create rules and conditions using regex pattern matching and booleans. It was actually a pleasure to do. That alone made it well worth my effort to learn!

Conclusion

Give lighttpd a try! After all, it is the web server behind YouTube. It’s light, easy to use and administer, and fast!