Lighttpd 1.4.20 is out

I was a big fan of lighttpd in 2006. It saved us from Apache (in our case replacing Apache + mod_php with lighttpd + php via fastcgi) at a time when we had an acute need to scale up on a limited set of hardware.

But in the last two and a half years, I've lost that positive feeling. Development has slowed dramatically -- point releases are infrequent, version 1.5 seems mired in rewrite after rewrite, bugs with detailed reports go untouched in trac. We had to restart our lighttpds every few days due to memory leaks. More minor issues like true graceful restarts and better proxy features were pushed off to 1.5.

We've since moved critical frontend serving and proxying to nginx, and after almost a year, it's been a dream. nginx has not failed once in billions of requests. We've pushed dozens of configuration changes, served big files, little files, proxying, keepalives, misbehaving clients, SSL, everything. Nginx just keeps on going. No memory leaks, no spurious logging, no complaints. I have literally restarted it once on our production servers, and that's because I'm an idiot and typed "restart" instead of "reload". I was sad. I thought we might get a year of uptime or more on the nginx master processes.

My only complaint about nginx is that the development process itself is less transparent than many open source projects. There are active English and Russian mailing lists, and Igor is stunningly responsive but I wish that there was an open issue tracker, source tree, etc. But that's a minor complaint against an otherwise fantastic piece of software.