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.