A new blip has appeared on the radar screen of Web Servers.  Since late 2006 a new entrant has emerged in the Web Server market place and is steadily gaining ground and popularity.  Netcraft’s monthly survey of Top Servers has shown a new entry into it’s Top Five Web Servers:  lighttpd.

As of June 2007 Lighty (or LightTPD) has just under 1.5 million sites

Jan Kneschke began work on lighttpd in 2003, when he wanted to develop a fast and lightweight alternative 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 Webserver 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) makes lighttpd the perfect Webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Meanwhile, Apache (in April 2007) stood at a 58.63% share of the Netcraft surveyed sites, running roughly flat month to month after it dropped 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.

Tags | General, Linux, Microsoft, Networking, Servers, Tech News