Talk:lighttpd

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Wikipedia and Youtube Hosting Web Servers

Wikipedia as well as Youtube runs on Apache Web Server. While isoHunt, piratebay and meebo, indeed use lighty. Here are http headers received from first two web sites:

 Response Headers
 Date	Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:57:48 GMT
 Server	Apache
 X-Content-Type-Options	nosniff
 Expires	Tue, 27 Apr 1971 19:44:06 EST
 Request Headers
 Host www.youtube.com
 User-Agent	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7
 Accept	text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
 Response Headers
 Date	Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:04:32 GMT
 Server	Apache
 X-Powered-By	PHP/5.2.5
 Request Headers
 Host	en.wikipedia.org
 User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.7) Gecko/2009021910 Firefox/3.0.7

As I understand it they use it for static content. That would include the video streams. What URL did you try in order to get those response headers? --Assarbad (talk) 00:24, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Site is down

lighttpd website has been down for quite a while for me; hopefully this isn't a sign of things to come. Perle 00:38, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The site has been working for quite some while now. --Acolyte of Discord 19:02, 8 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Even more support

LigHTTPd supports more than just poll() and select() nowadays. Currently it has epoll() (Linux 2.6) and rtsig (AIO? Linux 2.5), /dev/epoll (for Solaris) and unfinished kqueue() (for BSD) support. [Source] --Acolyte of Discord 19:02, 8 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

wikipedia runs on lighttpd?

I thought i would bring this up since it is of especial concern to the wikipedia community (or, at least, to me). I remember reading mentions of this before, but I've never really bothered to verify the claim until now.

Since I just stumbled onto the latest lighty blog entry which makes the claim that wikipedia runs on lighty, I thought I would try to verify this - search around wikipedia, look at the about page, look at the technical information page (Help:Contents/Technical_information)... Nothing! So should the site admins at least say something to either verify, or dispute the claim? --Autodidaktor 07:04, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you... I found the claim that wikipedia was running on lighty quite surprising, so I came to this page. I then did a WGET and checked the headers myself. The results show that the server is Apache. I see nothing that suggests Lighty is being used... maybe someone else could take a look? Here is the output:

 $ wget -O /dev/null -S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lighttpd
 --14:10:05--  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lighttpd
          => `/dev/null'
 Resolving en.wikipedia.org... 66.230.200.100
 Connecting to en.wikipedia.org|66.230.200.100|:80... connected.
 HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 
   HTTP/1.0 200 OK
   Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 19:08:31 GMT
   Server: Apache
   X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.2
   Content-Language: en
   Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
   Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate
   Last-Modified: Thu, 08 Feb 2007 07:08:02 GMT
   Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
   X-Cache: MISS from sq17.wikimedia.org
   X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq17.wikimedia.org:80
   Via: 1.0 sq17.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE9)
   Connection: close

[[]] 19:21, 11 February 2007 (UTC) David

upload.wikimedia.org was switched to lighty a while back. The main site runs Squid in a reverse proxy configuration with an Apache/MySQL backend. —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 20:40, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.wikipedia.org says apache --87.127.117.246 18:33, 20 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

But http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=upload.wikimedia.org shows lhttpd in the mix. That is doing image storage and retrieval. Wikipedia has servers and software between you and upload.wikimedia.org to (amongst other things) resize images to fit between the text. If you just want to get a raw image file you can take it direct from the lhttpd server at upload.wikimedia.org e.g. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Wikimedia-servers-2006-05-09.png. Wikipedia#Software_and_hardware doesn't seem to be particularly up to date. William Avery 20:48, 20 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Continuing your point, I guess they have heard of the aforementioned doubts, so they wrote a whole article that explains how dynamic 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia use this program to run special servers that just deal with static content. So it's specific parts of Wikipedia that use this program and not Wikipedia as a whole. Their article is now linked in the article here. -Lwc4life (talk) 17:33, 27 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

C'mon folks. Response headers can be faked. I've been running my lighttpd under the server token "Apache" for some time. You'll need more sophisticated methods to figure out what server software is used. Either way you could still be talking to a proxy and have lighttpd somewhere at its far end ;) --Assarbad (talk) 00:27, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

lhttpd?

Is lighttpd synonymous with/a fork of lhttpd, or are they completely unrelated? Googling suggests that lhttpd, lighttpd, lighty are used interchangeably. The old lhttpd seems abandoned since xmas 2001. (More confusion: Leahttpd also calls itself lhttpd) --87.162.45.42 22:56, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I know the two are unrelated, check 'The Server' at the bottom of http://www.lighttpd.net/the-story/ for info about where / how / why. --Streaky 19:47, 20 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Advantages and disadvantages

A user recently added the following section to the article, using the edit summary

(Added advantages and disadvantages of lighttpd (source: 2 years of lighttpd use, lighttpd source files and www.lighttpd.net).All text created by me and comes under GFDL terms.)

As this is by admission original research, I've moved the material here for discussion first. We'll need to find reliable sources for this material before it can be included.

Advantages

Most interesting feature of lighttpd is that it could serve really lots of static content to multiple users even if running in environments with limited resources. It could act as reasonably decent web server even if put into very resource-constrained device like router or NAS. For example, QNAP vendor uses lighttpd as web server in some of their NAS devices. Also owners of VDS servers with limited RAM amount may want to use lighttpd instead of using heavy servers like Apache.
Low RAM usage and it almost does not grows as load increases. Actually, lighttpd could upload to hundreds or even thousands users at high speed and still consume just several Mb of RAM by just single process. In contrast, servers like Apache with default settings may consume lots of RAM if there is hundreds of simultaneous connections due to hundreds processes or threads started. So, lighttpd could generally serve much more users on hardware with limited CPU power and RAM available than servers which start new process or thread for each new accepted connection.
Only single process with several threads. In some systems starting new process or thread could be expensive operation in terms of RAM usage and CPU load. Lighttpd has no any troubles here since it does not starts new processes or threads on per-user or per-connection basis. So, it really light in terms of CPU load. It usually I\O bound rather than CPU-bound. This means that lighttpd serving static files usually either limited by disk devices speed or by network interface speed rather than by anything else like CPU speed.
Supports CGI, FastCGI, SCGI and more. Works reasonably well with PHP. Trac has native support for lighttpd. Actually, lighttpd could be used as application server in many cases as well as static content server or reverse proxy server.

Disadvantages

While not exactly Lighttpd's disadvantage, it is not directly compatible with Apache's mod_rewrite. So to get well-looking URLs with some web engines some rules have to be reworked in lighttpd-specific way.
Same applies to .htaccess files. Lighttpd can't use them and rather have to be configured in it's own way. That's not Lighttpd fault but this could make migration from Apache somewhat hard.
Probably lighttpd's server design may have some troubles when it comes to hardware with big number of CPU cores (or CPUs). Since lighttpd uses only several threads it will not gain too much from adding more CPUs (if FastCGI application servers are running on same machine, FastCGI servers however will gain from this of course). However taking into account that lighttpd is really light and almost never bound by lack of CPU power, this probably almost never getting a real issue. As of 2008 even biggest sites like YouTube are able to use lighttpd.
Lighttpd's CGI protocols implementation has one weak point: it buffers output from CGI servers processes in internal buffers. In some rare scenarios this will lead to significant RAM memory consumption. With current lighttpd 1.4 design it is a really bad idea to use lighttpd to send iso-sized files obtained as data stream from CGI process. This does not affect for example, FLV streaming since there is special module for this which has no such issues. This issue may limit some uses of lighttpd. However in real world this issue rarely causes any problems.

Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 15:46, 3 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Windows systray program

"On Windows it can be controlled with the program Lighty Tray which integrates into the system tray."

Is this really relevant enought? I think not...

Ehamberg (talk) 21:34, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Horrendous Introduction - reads like Advert

"It is for speed, but it does all other things!". Get the f arihere. Anyone with elementary knowledge in ~~computing~~ the world knows there are tradeoffs. It reads like a fanboy ad. --Leladax (talk) 19:07, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Trojans in Windows builds

I would like to mention that at least two of the linked windows builds have trojans in them. yPortableWS Portable WLMP Project and WLMP Project - actual lighttpd builds for Windows. You can verify that easily by uploading some of the binaries to virustotal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.51.250.213 (talk) 16:18, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, sorry but VirusTotal is only as good as the virus scanners it uses. Being an AV researcher and developer myself I would urge you to be cautious with such accusations. One would have to look at the files in question directly in order to make sure malicious code is indeed contained. --Assarbad (talk) 00:51, 14 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Meaning of?

It's not clear to me what's the meaning of this phrase: "select()-/poll()-/epoll()". What are the "-/" intended to express? Is there a better way of saying what's intended? -- Dougher (talk) 20:22, 3 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed— added a dash of english and proper syntax of "," versus mysterious "-/" symbollogyism. WurmWoode^T 18:22, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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Removal of Lamp Figure

Hi, I was just reviewing this, and have removed the Lamp figure introduced here.

This figure seems to have been created for and is used on the LAMP article, and was the only reference to LAMP in this article. Lighttpd is a web server and is not part of a LAMP stack. TerryE (talk) 01:28, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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