Of course, the move to Lighttpd is not a small one, especially if our Apache configuration makes use of its many features. Systems tied into Apache as a module may make the move hard or even impossible without porting the module to a Lighttpd module or moving the functionality into CGI programs, if possible. We can ease the pain by moving in small steps. There are some obstacles on the way from Apache to Lighttpd. But a planned and careful approach will allow us to keep our server working while we change it.

Lighttpd is a secure, flexible, and most importantly, light web server designed and optimized for high performance environments. It is open-source and licensed under the revised BSD license. Its event-driven architecture optimized for a large number of parallel connections, its advanced features (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output Compression, URL Rewriting, and many more), and its small memory footprint compared to other web servers, make Lighttpd the perfect server software for every web server that suffers load problems or for serving static media separately from dynamic content.

Lighttpd supports the FastCGI, SCGI, and CGI interfaces to external programs, permitting web applications written in any programming language to be used with this server. Excellent performance for PHP, a particularly popular language, has received special attention. Additionally, Lighttpd has become popular within the Ruby on Rails community.

Suggested Readings Lighttpd and a book extract here for migrating from Apache.