Product: nginx

Update 6: nginx_http_push_module. Turn nginx into a long-polling message queuing HTTP push server.

Update 5: In Load Balancer Update Barry describes how WordPress.com moved from Pound to Nginx and are now "regularly serving about 8-9k requests/second and about 1.2Gbit/sec through a few Nginx instances and have plenty of room to grow!".
Update 4: Nginx better than Pound for load balancing. Pound spikes at 80% CPU, Nginx uses 3% and is easier to understand and better documented.
Update 3: igvita.com combines two cool tools together for better performance in Nginx and Memcached, a 400% boost!.
Update 2: Software Project on Installing Nginx Web Server w/ PHP and SSL. Breaking away from mother Apache can be a scary proposition and this kind of getting started article really helps easy the separation.
Update: Slicehost has some nice tutorials on setting up Nginx.

From their website:
Nginx ("engine x") is a high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3/SMTP proxy server. Nginx was written by Igor Sysoev for Rambler.ru, Russia's second-most visited website, where it has been running in production for over two and a half years. Igor has released the source code under a BSD-like license. Although still in beta, Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

Bob Ippolito says of Nginx:

The only solution I know of that's extremely high performance that offers all of the features that you want is Nginx... I currently have Nginx doing reverse proxy of over tens of millions of HTTP requests per day (thats a few hundred per second) on a single server. At peak load it uses about 15MB RAM and 10% CPU on my particular configuration (FreeBSD 6).

Under the same kind of load, Apache falls over (after using 1000 or so processes and god knows how much RAM), Pound falls over (too many threads, and using 400MB+ of RAM for all the thread stacks), and Lighty leaks more than 20MB per hour (and uses more CPU, but not significantly more).

See Also

Nginx vs. Lighttpd for a small VPS

nginx: high performance smpt/pop/imap proxy

Light Weight Web Server

Nginx and Mirror on Demand

Running Drupal with Clean URL on Nginx or Lighttpd

Goodbye Pound, Hello Nginx

Using Nginx, SSI and Memcache to Make Your Web Applications Faster

Ruby on Rails hosting with Nginx

NGINX Tutorial: Developing Modules

Product: lighttpd

lighttpd (pronounced "lighty") is a web server which is designed to be secure, fast, standards-compliant, and flexible while being optimized for speed-critical environments. Its low memory footprint (compared to other web servers), light CPU load and its speed goals make lighttpd suitable for servers that are suffering load problems, or for serving static media separately from dynamic content. lighttpd is free software / open source, and is distributed under the BSD license. lighttpd runs on GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. * Load-balancing FastCGI, SCGI and HTTP-proxy support * chroot support * select()-/poll()-based web server * Support for more efficient event notification schemes like kqueue and epoll * Conditional rewrites (mod_rewrite) * SSL and TLS support, via openSSL. * Authentication against an LDAP server * rrdtool statistics * Rule-based downloading with possibility of a script handling only authentication * Server-side includes support * Flexible virtual hosting * Modules support * Cache Meta Language (currently being replaced by mod_magnet) * Minimal WebDAV support * Servlet (AJP) support (in versions 1.5.x and up) * HTTP compression using mod_compress and the newer mod_deflate ( 1.5.x )

Information Sources

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd * http://highscalability.com/paper-lightweight-web-servers

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Paper: Lightweight Web servers

This paper is a great overview of different lightweight web servers. A lot of websites use lightweight web servers to serve images and static content. YouTube is one example: http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture. So if you need to improve performance consider changing over a different web server for some types of content. Overview: Recent years have enjoyed a florescence of interesting implementations of Web servers, including lighttpd, litespeed, and mongrel, among others. These Web servers boast different combinations of performance, ease of administration, portability, security, and related values. The following engineering study surveys the field of lightweight Web servers to help you find one likely to meet the technical requirements of your next project. "Lightweight" Web servers like lighttpd, litespeed, and mongrel can offer dramatic benefits for your projects. This article surveys the possibilities and shows how they apply to you. Important dimensions for evaluation of a Web server include: * Performance: How fast does it respond to requests? * Scalability: Does the server continue to behave reliably when many users simultaneously access it? * Security: Does the server do only the operations it should? What support does it offer for authenticating users and encrypting its traffic? Does its use make nearby applications or hosts more vulnerable? * Availability: What are the failure modes and incidences of the server? * Compliance to standards: Does the server respect the pertinent RFCs? * Flexibility: Can the server be tuned to accommodate heavy request loads, or computationally demanding dynamic pages, or expensive authentication, or ...? * Platform requirements: On what range of platforms is the server available? Does it have specific hardware needs? * Manageability: Is the server easy to set up and maintain? Is it compatible with organizational standards for logging, auditing, costing, and so on?

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