lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible Web server which has been optimized for high-performance environments.

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other Web servers, and it takes care of CPU load. lighttpd has an advanced feature set that includes FastCGI (load balanced), CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting, SSL, and much more.

Here are some key features of "lighttpd":

Advanced Features:

· virtual hosts
· virtual directory listings
· URL-Rewriting, HTTP-Redirects
· automatic expiration of files
· Large File Support (64bit fileoffsets)
· Ranges (start-end, start-, -end, multiple ranges)
· on-the-fly output-compression with transparent caching
· deflate, gzip, bzip2
· authentication
· basic, digest
· backends: plain files, htpasswd, htdigest, ldap
· fast and secure application controlled downloads
· Server Side Includes
· User Tracking
· FastCGI, CGI, SSI

PHP-Support:

· same speed as or faster than apache + mod_php4
· includes a utility to spawn FastCGI processes (neccesary for PHP 4.3.x)
· via FastCGI and CGI interface
· support Code Caches like Turckmm, APC or eaccelarator
· load-balanced FastCGI
· (one webserver distibutes request to multiple PHP-servers via FastCGI)

Security features:

· chroot(), set UID, set GID
· protecting docroot
· strict HTTP-header parsing

Platforms:

· Releases of lighttpd are built regulary for at least the following platforms

· Linux (binary packages for FC3, SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, PLD-Linux, OpenWRT)
· *BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X)
· SGI IRIX
· Windows (Cygwin)

· while it is known to compile cleanly on

· Solaris
· AIX

· and various other POSIX compatible OSes.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· There have been some important bug fixes (request parser handling for splitted header data, a fd leak in mod_cgi, a segfault with broken configs in mod_rewrite/mod_redirect, HUP detection and an OOM/DoS vulnerability).