Skip to content

Home

1.4.16 - Let’s ship it

We all could use some refreshment in this hot summer. So how about a fresh and shiny new lighttpd release? Sadly the main reasons are again a few security fixes. (Bad developers, bad!) But we broke it, we fix it. On the other hand we squeezed in a new cool feature aswell. The E-Tag generation is now configurable. So if your files are on a NFS cluster you can now e.g. disable the inode number usage for the E-Tag.

Teh bugz!!!

header parsing bug
Lighttpd SA 2007:03\ (patch: lighttpd-1.4.x_duplicated_headers_with_folding_crash.patch)
various mod_auth bugs
Lighttpd SA 2007:04\ Lighttpd SA 2007:05\ Lighttpd SA 2007:06\ Lighttpd SA 2007:07\ (patch: lighttpd-1.4.x_mod_auth_sec.patch)
mod_access bug
Lighttpd SA 2007:08\ (patch: lighttpd-1.4.x_mod_access_bypass.patch)
mod_fastcgi local DOS bug
Lighttpd SA 2007:09 (patch: lighttpd-1.4.x_mod_fastcgi_local_dos.patch)

The reader might wonder now why we delayed the release that long. We actually tried to get CVE numbers for all the bugs, to avoid confusion later. But so far we did not succeed in receiving them. As the bugs got publically announced now, we are forced to release.

External references

Download

  • lighttpd-1.4.16.tar.gz\ (sha1sum: b160cece6c0dd15746d10957d28ba02b2e9e77ce\ md5sum: 04988067026e93ccb46e19fa8c17ae97)
  • lighttpd-1.4.16.tar.bz2\ (sha1sum: 8f137ff71f629fe24a745c758b72dce24a8669f2\ md5sum: ea671997591f772417b7e540d325f8cc)

Thanks for using lighttpd! :)

Lighttpd 1.4.15 - The “following traditions” release

Here we are again. As a good tradition with lighttpd release we are bitten by a last minute hotfix in 1.4.14. :)

The bug appeared in 1.4.14 and users of 1.4.13 or older releases are not affected.

You can read up on the other 1.4.14 changes here.

Download

  • lighttpd-1.4.15.tar.gz\ (sha1sum: 67ba1279a0eaeda728c1e1143d302beb364a034c\ md5sum: d2ceaaf242b2b3593ff4d8222d543649)
  • lighttpd-1.4.15.tar.bz2\ (sha1sum: 742b567eca011fa5ef2cc506038389a4959eab56\ md5sum: b994b8c359da578dec073cae52c4924f)

Thanks for using lighttpd! :)

thread starvation

While running several benchmarks I saw that http_load was getting time outs for some of the connections. This has been seen with all web-servers and different backends in lighttpd as well.

After patching http_load to handle timed out and byte count errors correctly, I could easily separate the time outs from other problems. In one of the last changesets I added a infrastructure to track the time spent in lighttpd for a single connection including the time spent in the different stages of the gthread-aio backend:

  • scheduling the threaded-read()
  • starting the read() in the thread
  • waiting until it is finish
  • sending the result into the main-loop
  • writing the buffered data to the socket

buffered IO performance

Next to the raw-IO performance which is important for heavy, static file transfers the buffered IO performance is more interesting for sites which have a small set of static files which can be kept in the fs-caches.

As we are using hot-caches for this benchmark the “lightness” of the server becomes important. The less syscalls it has to do, the better.

The test-case is made up of 100MByte of files in the size of 10MByte and 100kByte.

raw IO performance

In lighttpd 1.5.0 we support several network backends. Their job is to fetch static data from disk and send it to the client.

We want to compare the different backends for their performance and when you want to use which.

  • writev
  • linux-sendfile
  • gthread-aio
  • posix-aio
  • linux-aio-sendfile

The impact of the stat-threads shall also be checked.

  • in releases
  • 2 min read

Latest Pre-Release

Changes

On the way from 1.4.x to 1.5.0 many things have been improved, changed and added and we try to keep track of them to make it easier for user to migrate their configuration.

  • IMPORTANT requires glib2-2.4.0 or higher
  • mod-fastcgi, mod-proxy and mod-scgi are replaced by mod-proxy-core

Must Read

  • https://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2007/01/31/threaded-stat
  • https://www.lighttpd.net/2007/02/03/raw-io-performance
  • https://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/12/19/1-5-0-works-on-win32-nativly-again
  • https://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/12/28/lighttpd-powers-5-alexa-top-250-sites

older pre-releases

  • https://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/12/18/pre-release-lighttpd-1-5-0-r1477-tar-gz
  • https://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/11/15/pre-release-lighttpd-1-5-0-r1454-tar-gz
  • https://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/11/14/pre-release-lighttpd-1-5-0-r1435-tar-gz
  • in story
  • 1 min read

lighttpd

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility – all of these describe LightTPD which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) LightTPD is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it’s Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.

light footprint + httpd = LightTPD (pronounced lighty)