In April, Netcraft's monthly survey showed a new entry in its top five Web servers: lighttpd. At that point "Lighty" (or "Light TPD") clocked in at 1.4 million sites, not including the reported Apache sites hosted by OpenSourceParking that Netcraft claims may actually have been running lighttpd. (Says Netcraft, "The opensourceparking.com headers say Apache, but have the Date & Server headers last, a pattern which is identical to the lighttpd response and entirely unlike a typical Apache response. The etag is also not in Apache format, and matches the lighttpd format".)
Jan Kneschke began work on lighttpd in 2003, when he wanted to develop a fast and lightweight alernative to Apache. Since then a community has grown around lighttpd, which has its own home (with a blog, a wiki and a forum) at lighttpd.net. The description there goes, "lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. It has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems."
Meanwhile, Apache in April stood at a 58.63% share of the Netcraft surveyed sites, running roughly flat month to month after it droped about the same 5% that Microsoft servers gained in April of last year. Don't be surprised to see lighttpd and Apache combine to increase open source server market shares, while also increasing choice. Watch netcraft.com for more developments.
- Doc Searls