

Lighttpd 1.4.20 is out - hs
http://www.lighttpd.net/2008/9/30/1-4-20-otherwise-the-terrorists-win

======
jbyers
I was a big fan of lighttpd in 2006. It saved us from Apache (in our case
replacing Apache + mod_php with lighttpd + php via fastcgi) at a time when we
had an acute need to scale up on a limited set of hardware.

But in the last two and a half years, I've lost that positive feeling.
Development has slowed dramatically -- point releases are infrequent, version
1.5 seems mired in rewrite after rewrite, bugs with detailed reports go
untouched in trac. We had to restart our lighttpds every few days due to
memory leaks. More minor issues like true graceful restarts and better proxy
features were pushed off to 1.5.

We've since moved critical frontend serving and proxying to nginx, and after
almost a year, it's been a dream. nginx has not failed once in billions of
requests. We've pushed dozens of configuration changes, served big files,
little files, proxying, keepalives, misbehaving clients, SSL, everything.
Nginx just keeps on going. No memory leaks, no spurious logging, no
complaints. I have literally restarted it once on our production servers, and
that's because I'm an idiot and typed "restart" instead of "reload". I was
sad. I thought we might get a year of uptime or more on the nginx master
processes.

My only complaint about nginx is that the development process itself is less
transparent than many open source projects. There are active English and
Russian mailing lists, and Igor is stunningly responsive but I wish that there
was an open issue tracker, source tree, etc. But that's a minor complaint
against an otherwise fantastic piece of software.

~~~
toxik
nginx has crazy, crazy configuration flexibility. I mean really, the likes of
which I've never seen - the things I've done with it...

Things that I'd normally write a small FastCGI script for, I make nginx do
only through its configuration and core options.

nginx - best thing to come out of Russia since the Tesla Coil.

~~~
ivankirigin
Tesla was Serbian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla>

