Lighttpd 1.4.68 Brings Stronger TLS Defaults, KTLS Sendfile Support For Faster Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lighttpd 1.4.68 Brings Stronger TLS Defaults, KTLS Sendfile Support For Faster Performance

Lighttpd 1.4.68 was released on Tuesday as the newest version of this lightweight, high performance open-source web server...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lighttpd-1.4.68

[caligula]

Is this still relevant? I thought nginx kind of won this race years ago. Some cool kids were using lighty some 15 years ago.

[ehansin]

Is this still relevant? I thought nginx kind of won this race years ago. Some cool kids were using lighty some 15 years ago.

I was thinking about this earlier and almost posted. There was talk quite a few years ago about a 2.0 new architecture release or something like that. Right now seems like the 1.4.x line is being maintained, but not sure how much innovation happening. I just don't know.

I'm half-kidding here, but I suppose partially serious. Would be cool to see nice lightweight Rust based web server with a very sane configuration language/format. Don't think this post and thread will get a lot more traction, but I do have my popcorn ready For real, just made some!

[NobodyXu]

I was thinking about this earlier and almost posted. There was talk quite a few years ago about a 2.0 new architecture release or something like that. Right now seems like the 1.4.x line is being maintained, but not sure how much innovation happening. I just don't know.

I'm half-kidding here, but I suppose partially serious. Would be cool to see nice lightweight Rust based web server with a very sane configuration language/format. Don't think this post and thread will get a lot more traction, but I do have my popcorn ready For real, just made some!

AFAIK, Rust already got all the fundemental libraries required for this to happen.

Tokio, the high performance async executor/reactor that's easy to use and already v1.23.1
Rustls for a "port" of the core wolfssl that is verified to rust while anything else, like the parsing part that often has CVEs, is written in rust.
ktls, https://lib.rs/crates/ktls, a crate that enables ktls to be used with rustls, is also available.
Crypto libraries like sha256, etc and compression/decompression libraries like deflate, zlib, gzip, xz, zstd are also available.
hyper, which supports http and https, and working on http3, is almost v1.0.0
There're also a dozens of ser/deser libraries written in rust that works with serde, so that you can just write a struct and deser/ser them.
Other libraries, such as additional sync primitives (arc-swap, left-right) for read-heavy situations are also available.

Since cloudflare already puts up their own server, I suppose we just need someone willing to developnthe server, it's not going to be very hard with these dependencies already available on crates.io

[Jakobson]

Is this still relevant? I thought nginx kind of won this race years ago. Some cool kids were using lighty some 15 years ago.

Some cool kids still play with embedded systems these days.

[zboszor]

Some cool kids still play with embedded systems these days.

Cool kids like the ones maintaining menuboards and POS systems for fast food restaurants. Lighty is used on those systems.

[caligula]

Some cool kids still play with embedded systems these days.

Is this supposed to be a joke? The nginx package is less than 300 kB larger than lighttpd.

[Jakobson]

Is this supposed to be a joke? The nginx package is less than 300 kB larger than lighttpd.

On x86? ARM binaries use to be larger than x86 ones. It is still just the size of binary code but also dynamic runtime RAM usage should be taken in account.
Embedded devices typically do not have huge amount of RAM, most cases only 1-2 GB. Even most of low-end Android phones don't have many gigabytes memory.

[caligula]

On x86? ARM binaries use to be larger than x86 ones. It is still just the size of binary code but also dynamic runtime RAM usage should be taken in account.
Embedded devices typically do not have huge amount of RAM, most cases only 1-2 GB. Even most of low-end Android phones don't have many gigabytes memory.

Only 1-2 GB O_o? ok. Pro tip: if you have to use low-end hardware, try using native toolkits instead of running a full web stack on the system..

[uid313]

Apache vs Lighttpd vs Nginx vs IIS vs something else?

I think maybe Nginx has the best performance?
But Apache has the advantage of configuration? Apache is flexible and supports .htaccess in each directory for those who like that.

I'm half-kidding here, but I suppose partially serious. Would be cool to see nice lightweight Rust based web server with a very sane configuration language/format. Don't think this post and thread will get a lot more traction, but I do have my popcorn ready For real, just made some!

Yeah, I would like to see a web server written in Rust too. TOML could be the configuration format.

Embedded devices typically do not have huge amount of RAM, most cases only 1-2 GB. Even most of low-end Android phones don't have many gigabytes memory.

Google requires Android phones that ship with Android 13 to have at least 2 GB RAM.