Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Apache vs Lighttpd, the Slant community recommends Apache for most people. In the question“What are the best web servers?” Apache is ranked 2nd while Lighttpd is ranked 3rd.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Pro Powerful
Apache has a lot of features and functionality.
Pro Excellent OS support
Pro Easy solutions for complex configurations
Due to it's maturity, Apache has a lot of features to cover a wide range of situations.
Pro Great documentation
Apache has thorough documentation.
Pro Simple setup for static content
Pro Fast and built for scalability
Lighttpd is event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking and single threaded. This allows lighttpd to be manage resources more efficiently compared to thread-based models (like Apache).
Pro Highly efficient memory use
With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load.
Pro Free and open source
Pro Lightweight
Lighttpd offers a more basic set of functions out of the box compared most web servers. Extra functionality can be added via modules.
Pro Quite easy to setup and configure
Cons
Con Arcane configuration format
Configuration is as good as the manuals go. As soon as you have to configure it by yourself, it becomes a lot more difficult due to a rather obtuse system of configuration with long and confusing variable names, which has become infamous among web developers.
Con Process Based Request Handling
Each request opens a new process/fork to handle just that request (ver memory inefficient)
Con Extremely inneficient
Opens a new thread for each request. In practice this means that unless you use a proxy (nginx) you can only have a certain number of people on your site at a time, and is extremely inefficient on the server side.
