When comparing H2O vs Lighttpd, the Slant community recommends Lighttpd for most people. In the question“What are the best web servers?” Lighttpd is ranked 3rd while H2O is ranked 10th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast
C implementation, server is optimised for speed. Claims to be significantly faster than Nginx according to some benchmarks (details on GitHub homepage).
Pro HTTP/2 ready
Written ground-up to support HTTP/2 as well as 1.0 and 1.1
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.