Apache vs. Lighttpd

Rails
1

I’m a long time user of Apache - first 1.3.x and then 2.x for about two
years now I guess. People
seem to be raving about Lighttpd, and, from what I’ve read, it appears
to perform much better than
Apache, especially with lots of connections*.
Is Lighttpd easier to configure, setup, etc.? Any other compelling
reasons to switch to it? I feel
like I have a lot of stuff added in to Apache (various mods, mod_rewrite
rules, etc.) - maybe use
them both in parallel?

thanks
csn

  • Yesterday I received over 20,000 visits from Googlebot to one site,
    and many more hits to other
    sites from Googlebot and other bots - server load was around 8-10 most
    of the day. (These sites
    don’t use much caching - client or server side - but I plan on switching
    them to Rails and
    utilizing its caching).
2

I’m using lighttpd and it’s very easy to configure for Rails use.
As for performance, you can read one case of Apache vs lighttpd at
Textdrive:
http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/44/taking-a-full-frontal-slashdot-lighttpdly

Regards, Bill

3

Support for mod_proxy’s rewriting rules in lighttpd is lacking.
Mod_spelling, mod_svn are both missing.

Apart from that I have found no reason to use apache any more. Lighttpd
is
faster, less of a memory hog and it is very easy to configure. The main
thing I like about lighttpd is its conditional based config file. You
can
even do nested conditionals, which allows you to do somethings you can’t
do
in apache (like forcing a certain virtual host to use a https
connection).

For example to do a virtual host you do:

$HTTP[‘host’] =~ ‘some regex expression’ {
some stuff
like server.document-root = /some/where/else
or a fastcgi thing
}

Miles

4

2005/11/17, Miles Wu [email protected]:

Support for mod_proxy’s rewriting rules in lighttpd is lacking.

It has mod_proxy module but it is very limited if compared to Apache.
It has also mod_rewrite but again it is very limited if compared to
Apache. E.g. there is no way for using lighttpd instead of Apache for
Zope/Plone. mod_rewrite can map only to local url. And mod_rewrite can
map only to IP instead of full URL… I am using Plone with several
virtual hosts and one IP. Lighttpd cannot do
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://host.domain:8080/$1 [P,L]
nor
ProxyPass / http://host.domain:8080/

–
JZ

5

Mod_spelling, mod_svn are both missing.
…
Support for mod_proxy’s rewriting rules in lighttpd is lacking.

We are usually combining it with reverse proxy (pound) - [
apsis.ch ].
lighttpd (and apache if needed for something - svn etc.) started on
127.0.0.1, different ports. Based on url pound forward requests to
lighttpd or apache (or even resin for java stuff). Helps also with
load balancing/failover detection. Also pound handle all HTTPS stuff,
so even web servers with missing support for it (https) are OK.