Lighttpd is lightweight open source web server. Lighty is used by several of the largest web 2.0 websites for variety of task including meebo, wikipedia & YouTube. Its comparable in feature set to Apache but with a much lighter footprint.

What pulled elitespark to using lighty is its speed & its amazingly small memory footprint. One issue we had to overcome was lighty’s rewrite conditions. In Lighttpd, when attempting to setup pretty url’s, there is no easy way to detect first if a file already exist.

This was easily accomplished in Apache through the following rewrite condition:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*) /index.php/$1

After hours of searching we have found the best way to do this is by checking the filetype extension:
url.rewrite = (
^/(.*.php|.*.css|.*.js|.*.gif|.*.png|.*.jpg)(.*)" => "$0",
"^/(.*)" => "/index.php/$1"
)

By switching to lighttpd its helped us reduce cost while maintaining the stability & performance that’s required.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 10:37 am .