Three Cheers for Lighttpd
Lighttpd is a very small, very fast, very lightweight webserver program that’s been gaining in popularity in recent years; while it doesn’t have all the features of its more bloated predecessors, what it does, it does very well. I’ve written about it before – servers running Lighttpd serve up most of the images, and all the downloads, for this website – and countless others have sung its praises, but I was interested to see that it’s powering the immensely popular electoral-vote.com website this year. It couldn’t keep up with election-day traffic in 2004, running Apache, but the webmaster, according to an update posted earlier today, anticipates that it should handle today’s traffic – so far, over 140,000 pageviews per hour – without any problems. There’s no doubt that the servers he’s using this year are more powerful than what he was using four years ago, but I strongly suspect that switching to a high-performance webserver has made every bit as much difference, if not more.
