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In the world of Open Source, I would also like to see the sum total of Open Source web servers VS. IIS:

Nginx http://www.nginx.org/ ( really popular and at least this is in one of the graphs)
Lighttpd http://www.lighttpd.net/ (personally, I have found many reasons use this one in the past and I'm sure I will again)
Cherokee http://www.cherokee-project.co... (yet to explore past a basic setup)
Roxen Webserver http://www.roxen.com/products/... (Still need to take for a spin)

And then special purpose web servers.

HTTP Explorer http://http-explorer.sourcefor...
HFS HTTP File Server http://www.rejetto.com/hfs/

At least that's all I can think of. Anybody else?
I know some of these take up negligible market share, but I would still like to see their market share lumped together.

Sorry, that was dumb and rude on my part - I glossed over everything but multiplexing.

Your right, Nginx doesn't have a FastCGI process manager built in. PHP has a couple, I use PHP-FPM which is part of PHP as of 5.3.3. There's also spawn-fcgi ( http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki ) for more generic needs. This completely seperates the HTTP server from the application (even to another machine if you like), but is certainly another thing to configure.

As for actual connection persistence to backends, I know that has been discussed, but thought the performance difference was negligible and added serious complexity to have Nginx maintain a connection pool to backends.

Netcraft can only tell you what the server is configured to tell it.

See: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#servertokens
And: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#serversignature
Or, if it's even Apache at all, consider: http://forum.lighttpd.net/topic/3887

Finally, even if you had the version of apache and the server wasn't lying to you, it's the OpenSSL and/or GNUtls library version you'd need to know to actually find out what's supportable, and that still doesn't tell you if the admin disabled specific protocol versions. (ie, Apache/1.3.42 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31 could probably be compiled against libssl 1.0.0 or 0.0.6 for all you know. Assuming it's not lighttpd configured to lie.)

The only way to know what version of SSL/TLS is supported is to connect and ask for decreasing versions until one is accepted.

2. SSL for virtual hosts is not supported by Internet Explorer (yet another problem with IE)

I am not sure why it is not working for you, however it works for me. I tested my copy of Windows XP with IE 8 with my instance of Lighttpd which has four domains with a UCC/SAN cert for the four domains from StartSSL all hosted on a single IP address.

Many of us have moved away from Apache altogether. I mean, with lighttpd and nginx available, there's really little need for Apache these days.

Why does the world need a non-free web server that only runs on Windows when there's already plenty of free (as in speech) ones out there (http://www.apache.org/, http://www.lighttpd.net/) that run everywhere?,

For the same reason there are more than five models of vehicle on the roadways: Different needs.

Why does the world need a non-free web server that only runs on Windows when there's already plenty of free (as in speech) ones out there (http://www.apache.org/, http://www.lighttpd.net/) that run everywhere?

I might subscribe to your theory if it weren't for the fact that lighttpd, which is a first-rate open-source web server, is explicitly listed as not vulnerable.

Just to be different, I run: Linux, Lighttpd, Sqlite, Kepler

Googles web server is actually a custom build of Apache (not for resale), lighttpd is a custom build of apache as well.

Lighttpd is no "custom build of apache". http://www.lighttpd.net/story

It's localization and language problem, not a geolocation problem. Where you are or where they think you are has nothing to do with the problem. Quebec is officially bilingual English and French, so while you are correct in that the services like Yahoo! are wrong to serve you French ads, it's because they are ignoring your browser's language preference settings.

Many other countries and regions have more than one official language. It's pathetic to see the slow, steady evaporation of technical knowledge in the market. Ten years ago, anyone and everyone working with WWW services knew how to deal with user-specified language preferences and, where more than one language was required, used the HTTP content negotiation. It's very easy in Apache to support this HTTP function. For Lighttpd you need a lua script, but that too is easy. For Yahoo or Google, they have their own home grown HTTP servers, so have to file a bug report directly with them.

I know this is a bit off-subject, but every time I hear people talk about Apache, I wonder if it's not starting to lose ground. Look at a lot of the new "Web 2.0" sites -- they often run less monolithic servers, which often support FCGI and other features natively. I am talking about nginx, lighthttpd and the like. Will these stay a niche market or is Apache going to feel the competition?

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

But isn't WEBrick only intended for development or very small sites ?

But isn't mongrel intended for very few connections and must have a load balancer in front of it ?

What are real life experiences.
Lighttpd with fastcgi: http://www.lighttpd.net/ ?

Lightspeed: http://www.litespeedtech.com/products/webserver/do wnload/ ?

Linux Apache/2.0.46 (Unix) PHP/4.3.3

lol

yea whats up with apache being such a ram memory hug? i recommend the author switches to lighttpd or nginx

Read this instead

YouTube, reddit, parts of wikipedia, imageshack, sourceforge all use lighttpd.. Are those small sites?

More here: http://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2006/12/28/light tpd-powers-5-alexa-top-250-sites

want performance from php?

Dump Apache! its the slowest link!

use Lighttpd + latest PHP 5.2.2 + APC

It depends on your task. If you are building small to medium-sized web-applications, I would recommend Seaside. For larger projects, there are things like GNUstepWeb and Struts. If you want something slow that doesn't scale well, but is 100% buzzword-compliant, then there's Ruby on Rails. If you want to re-use existing ASP.NET code then you could try Mono.

For many needs, Apache is not a good choice. I personally prefer Lighttpd, which is lighter, faster, and easier to configure. It has nice FastCGI integration, so you can use it with most frameworks.

As for databases, I still haven't found a good reason to use MySQL. If you need a real database, I'd go with PostgreSQL, which is more standards compliant than MySQL, and faster for complex queries. If you want something slightly more structured than a flat file, then try SQLite, which is simple, lightweight, and faster than MySQL for simple queries.

Linux (the 'L' in the acronym) is still cool isn't it? I don't see him argue against Linux, and he better not be. (okay it can easily be replace by another kernel like FreeBSD)

Apache is still hot i think, especially for feature richness and privillige systems it rocks. For a small webserver i'd prefer http://lighttpd.net/, http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/ or http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/. But yeah, the 'A' in LAMP is still okay (not that the author argues this, heay _he_ claims LAMP == BASIC).

MySQL has some very nice features (mainly clustering), that leaves other opensource dbs far behind. I personally prefer to use a db as 'fast yet dumb storage', that is my personal preference, and that makes MySQL a perfect candidate.

But the 'P' as in PHP, or according to some Perl aswell. Yeah i deffinitly think these to languages have been superceded by far. I concider Ruby, PHP, and Java superior choises in an opensource environment.

So its that 'P' in LAMP that, IMHO, is the BASIC of today... Hard to maintain, hard to write well. Yups, I'd say: DROP IT.

Cies Breijs.

XCache is a fast, stable php opcode cacher that has been tested and now running on production server under high load. It support and is tested on all lastest php cvs branches, such as PHP_4_3 PHP_4_4 PHP_5_0 PHP_5_1 PHP_5_2 HEAD(6.x)

What do you think of the newer smaller competitors? Particularly LightTPD. Would it be worthwhile for Apache to work to "slim down"? While Apache is seen by many as a slimmer alternative to more monolithic servers like IIS, it seems that it may be vulnerable to the even smaller alternatives. And this new round of competitors is nearly as featureful and extendable as Apache. What can Apache do to stay current and competitive?

Sorry I'm replying to myself, but one more thing I remembered:

If done just right, you can set up a Linux server and totally forget about it until the end of time for all anyone cares. My own machine, a 700MHz Duron with 256MB RAM, manages to run Apache, sendmail, VSFTPD, and BitTorrent – and not to mention MySQL and a few other internal-use-only-type things – oh, and OpenSSH as well for remote logins, and the occassional VNC session – without any problems; you just have to know what you do and don't need. I've set it up so that it only allows around 20 or so simultaneous connections, and just about the only time it ever needs tweaking is if there's a new version of Ultima Linux out. (And I should know...)

Another suggestion would be to choose a different program to run the site. I hear that lighttpd is pretty good, and mininova would probably agree with me here... I haven't used it much personally, because I've become overly dependant on Apache's mod_rewrite, but it's worth checking out if you don't want to over-burden the server.

Configuration, configuration, configuration!

"Fix perchild" was one of the apache / google summer of code projects; I haven't seen a status update since "someone has expressed interest in doing this" though :(

For that solution I would use http://www.lighttpd.net/

lighttpd does separate user per vhost? I scanned the docs looking for that feature, but couldn't find it :-/

On single machine? Anyway - it eats resources to heavily in such setup :(

For that solution I would use http://www.lighttpd.net/ (needs less memory than apache).

If there just would be a sponsor for such project + some apache developer interested..

...to pump LightTPD as a lightweight and simpler web server solution alternative to Apache. LightTPD has a smaller memory footprint then Apache does as well. Apache processes had greater than 10% of my system memory used while running a personal web server. Running the same setup with lighttpd showed around 0.3% CPU used. Configuration is still a little confusing to the average newb, but IMHO setup was easier with LightTPD.

Saying that web server performance is better than Apache-httpd is like saying fish can swim better than dogs, it's true ... but pretty meaningless. Apache-httpd developers have publicly stated that they don't consider performance a design goal, and their email server is actually Apache-httpd in disguise.

As for lighttpd being "secure" it had a problem this year where you could bypass checks by using the NIL byte encoded. As a web server author I can only say "Like, Duh!" ... and after taking a 10 minute grep[1] of 1.4.7 I can see a buffer overflow already, I'm not sure how easy it is for a normal user to do (and it's only a couple of bytes) but I don't care too much either. The obvious DOS is there for the Range header, and the symlink "protection" is smoke and mirrors (stat check followed by a non-checked open()).

It also doesn't seem to support Accept/Accept-Language negotiation, which I thought was pretty weird (feel free to disagree).

Obviously I'm somewhat biased, given that I've writen my own, but then I do have a "security guarantee" with it.

[1] For anyone who does care do a strncpy grep in http_auth.c (I looked at version 1.4.7)

First, If you actually read through the blurb (not even the article) you'd see that they're not talking about web servers - they're talking about Apache, the organization behind the web server.

Second, I would recommend the up-and-coming lighttpd, which I have used for both static and dynamic content. I have never used thttpd so I am not sure how it compares on the static end.

Or if you want something smaller than Apache and a little more than just static pages try http://www.lighttpd.net/. It is secure and beats Apache 2 performance wise and the configuration takes only a few minutes. It runs on my small server for months now and is certainly worth a look.

Try lighty its one of the features it has that apache doesn't... its not the only needed feature by many sites that apache is missing there are about a gazallian more... I don't know why it doesn't have apache market share as so many things about it makes it better from lower memory footprint to being able to handle a slashdotting VERY VERY well.

Its under the revised BSD license so its license is better than Apache's.

And before you say it doesn't have .htaccess support... well read why thats a good thing and it has something better than .htaccess support to replace it

Oh yea most of the biggest torrent trackers are using lighty.

Try lighty its one of the features it has that apache doesn't... its not the only needed feature by many sites that apache is missing there are about a gazallian more... I don't know why it doesn't have apache market share as so many things about it makes it better from lower memory footprint to being able to handle a slashdotting VERY VERY well.

Its under the revised BSD license so its license is better than Apache's.

And before you say it doesn't have .htaccess support... well read why thats a good thing and it has something better than .htaccess support to replace it

Oh yea most of the biggest torrent trackers are using lighty.

I was going to plug lighttpd too, but it looks like you beat me to it. I did a bunch of tests of lesser-known web servers a while back, including lighttpd. It was among the easiest to get running, it performed well, it was the only one that scaled well as users were added, etc. I've used it at work several times to replace broken Apache instances included as part of a third-party package, and it has always worked like a champ. It's an excellent piece of software that I think deserves more recognition.

Though this one is pretty good, too.

There's a reason why I'd not use IIS (again). First of all, I really love the freedom of open source software. And to get back to the benchmark, well, I just think that the apache server could have had some better circumstances. To be honest, I think if I set up an apache webserver it would not run slower than the IIS (hey, it's just god damn paradox). But, apart from the apache-vs-iis-war, I can only recommend using http://www.lighttpd.net/. It's really fast, simple and secure, unlike others.

DONT USE APACHE.

It's a horrible resource hog and expecially for static files there are FAR better solutions out there. Tux, lighttpd etc.

http://www.lighttpd.net/benchmark/

and no, apache 2 isnt much better.

Guys ever considered using Lighttpd? Definetely recommend taking a look at it.

We switched from Apache+mod_php to Lighttpd and PHP as a fastcgi module. Allows you to do crazy things like having boxes that only serve PHP requests... and it's almost a drop in Apache replacement but a single-process non-blocking daemon w/a memory+cpu footprint that's hard to believe.

On that note keep up the good work w/Wikipedia!

It supports FastCGI so pretty much any webserver that has support for FCGI should work. lighttpd is my personal favorite (much less bloated than Apache). IIS has a FastCGI ISAPI plugin so IIS should be fairly easy.

they want to make sure everyone is nice and compliant about upgrading when they decide to take httpd over to java like all the other java kool-aid they are selling --- Maven is Jonestown, lets all program in XML because its standard! Cultures breakdown when there is too little disent and questioning of authority, the apache foundtion is headed in that direction.

Lets move on, SOA and all that, most people don't need any of this mod_* crap and could use:
thttpd he has other servers there, too and http_load.
lighttpd I'm moving to this sweet little server for most apps and the home site runs ea php and ruby on rails
AOLServer like OpenACS runs on
Boa
fnord from our boy who did the (in)famous benchmarks
Cherokee I root for this one for some reason.
gatling
cthulhu
yaws in erlang, should support more simul. connections than the unlying OS can support.
dhttpd
Litespeed check out their php benchmarks
thy
roxen
mini-httpd never tried this one
xitami I have a intranet server running for 5 yrs (without upgrading xitami) on xitami Solaris, simple, small, easy to admin, never dies max uptime was 1000 days+.
eddiefor complex load bal and geographic distribution
hiawatha

And for the love of god, please at least design your sites to get their images from images.mysite.com if possible so that you can use a non-bloatware web server to server the images, reserving horsepower on your apache server for stuff that actually _requires_ some features of apache.

http://www.hcsw.org/awhttpd/ updated on 12-06-2004
http://www.norz.org/zawhttpd.html
http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html

lighttpd is a pretty good up-and-coming alternative I've been testing lately. It's faster than apache for both static and dynamic (php, python, ruby) content.