lighttpd
IMPORTANT all 1.4.x users should upgrade to 1.4.19, all users of 1.5-svn should at least upgrade to r1922.

Powered by Lighttpd

April 4th, 2007

lighttpd is used by many well-known sites. The typical scenario is using lighttpd as off-load server to push out static content and leave to complex work to another server.

One example is YouTube. They have a farm of servers which push out the thumbnails you see before you see the movies:

$ curl -I http://sjl-static16.sjl.youtube.com/vi/TgF_eRkfqEY/2.jpg
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: image/jpeg
ETag: "983726135810477085"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Fri, 03 Feb 2006 04:32:53 GMT
Content-Length: 3495
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:49:51 GMT
Server: lighttpd-aio/1.4.11.8

As you see in the name-scheme, there are some more of those servers pushing out content.

On wikipedia they run at least 2 servers with lighttpd:

  • upload.wikimedia.org
  • download.wikimedia.org

While download is used to distribute the SQL dumps of the database when tend to grow above the magic 4GByte border, upload is used to push out all the images and resize them when necessary.

$ curl -I http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Mandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg/250px-Mandel_zoom_00_mandelbrot_set.jpg
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: image/jpeg
ETag: "6460328581220324712"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:24:53 GMT
Content-Length: 5973
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:16:19 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.13
X-Cache: HIT from sq13.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from sq13.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: HIT from knsq12.knams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from knsq12.knams.wikimedia.org:3128
Age: 6265
X-Cache: HIT from knsq10.knams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from knsq10.knams.wikimedia.org:80
Via: 1.0 sq13.wikimedia.org:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE12), 1.0 knsq12.knams.wikimedia.org:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE12), 1.0 knsq10.knams.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE12)
Connection: close

4 Responses to “Powered by Lighttpd”

  1. PCMasters Says:
    April 9th, 2007 at 04:13 PM Some other admins told us about lighttpd and told us, that it runs faster than apache on bigger projects. So we move till the next weeks on lighttpd, too. Great Project.
  2. 2ge Says:
    April 10th, 2007 at 08:28 PM I am running lighttd too, but in headers is apache. I don't know why it is so, if it is default, or... $ curl -I http://www.opensubtitles.org/en HTTP/1.1 200 OK X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.6 Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=9e3102b4e71709e6bb92cffaca917159; path=/ Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache Content-type: text/html Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 20:28:42 GMT Server: Apache/2
  3. Basio Says:
    April 10th, 2007 at 09:22 PM @my server it works fine! and gratz for this great "references"
  4. Adrenalin Says:
    April 14th, 2007 at 12:15 PM Can anyone explain what mean the "X-Cache: HIT from.." and "X-Cache-Lookup:" stuff ? And why it is multiple ? Cached by more servers ? Hm ?

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