“There’s far more to the world of Web servers than just Apache and IIS. While lightweight Web servers have much in common, there’s also variation within the category. Most are written in C, but several other implementation languages have proven successful among the servers with which I’ve experimented, including Erlang, Java, Lisp, Lua, Perl, Python, and Tcl. If there’s a language you favor, you can probably find a lightweight Web server here coded for your convenience. survey the possibilities and see how they apply to you.”
I’m using lighttpd and nginx on certain sites. And they can upload much more static content than Apache or IIS will ever manage, given same horsepower.
They could be damn nice in resource constrained environments like embedded devices or VDS servers (where more RAM means more money to pay).
“There’s far more to the world of Web servers than just Apache and IIS.”
That’s right. Apache and IIS are not only available heavyweight web servers out there. Sun Java System Web Server is highly scalable web server aimed at large workloads and it has been recently open sourced under the name ‘Open Web Server’.
I use the Sun Java System Web Server and it’s an excellent product and my preference at this point in time.
An article listing tens of lightweight, fast HTTP servers, and Cherokee isn’t listed? Whoa, that’s really a great miss, since Cherokee beats performance wise any other real server (IIS, Apache, nginx, lighttpd) both in static and dynamic content.
> Cherokee beats performance wise any other real server
>(IIS, Apache, nginx, lighttpd) both in static and
>dynamic content
Did you ever tried lighttpd or nginx yourself? Are there any proof links? As for me, lighttpd serves on 100mbps link to some 100-500 concurrent users and just consumes 4Mb RAM and 1% of CPU, virtually regardless of concurrent users. And even on gigabit it has no troubles. It is rather your disk subsystem who will limit the fun, not a server (HDDs are having troubles saturating gigabit if access is not linear and 100 users are rarely downloading same file in same time, yeah?).
It can also withstand against “C10K problem” virtually anywhere, given proper configuration. It even works for me on my router (MIPS32 CPU at 264MHz, 32Mb RAM, also known to others as Asus WL500GP wi-fi router).
Furthermore, on load testing I achieved impressive 9GBps throughput with lighttpd when transferring data on localhost using usual crappy PC (Yeah, I have no 10Gbps card, he-he).
P.S. lighttpd serves such “small” thing as YouTube and Wikipedia for example. If you will take a look on YouTube or Wikipedia internals, you will figure out that while it looks like Apache on front pages, heaviest jobs like uploading big files to users (yeah, these big flash movies on youtube, media files on Wikipedia or whatever else) – all this done by lighttpd, actually. And such insignificant site like WordPress now uses nginx … because it was ONLY thing which actually survives and works at 8000 connections per second anyhow. Are you sure you can beat this?