First of all, my previous post on Nginx vs. Lighttpd for a small VPS seems to be a “hit”. Thanks to Glenn for submitting it to programming.reddit.com, which got picked up by a few bloggers. Got around 1,000 unique visitors on the day where the post went live, which I guess is pretty good for this one-post-a-week site of mine.

Since I have briefly touched on the “URL rewrite-ability” of Nginx and Lighttpd in my previous post, I think it might actually be useful to have some examples showing how rewrite rules are written on these web servers to support clean URLs. I will take the open source CMS Drupal for example, as it is what Hosting Fu runs on. Btw, Drupal 5.0 has just been released and it rocks.

I have been using Lighttpd for almost a year and Nginx for a month on my servers. I know that they were created to be massively scalable, solving the C10k problem. However their asynchronised-IO model and small memory foot-print also make them suitable as alternative HTTP servers for memory-limited VPS. Alternative = Anything but the current defacto Apache.

I will be writing more about Lighttpd and Nginx later during the year, but will try to use this post to draw some comparison between Nginx, the new darling of these light-weight web servers, and Lighttpd, many Web 2.0 developers’ all time favourite.

I had a problem with Lighttpd and PHP on the default Gentoo install. The configuration that comes with Gentoo, and the “official recommendation” use bin-ath in the mod_fastcgi to point to PHP’s CGI executable.