lighttpd

I really like the fact that the config file is much cleaner and easier to understand than some of the legacy HTTP servers. Its web serving, redefined! :)

The down side is that its FastCGI (i.e. Perl) handling is still pretty weak. Someone please show me how to run Perl CGI quickly on this web server!

Later...
Richard

Lighttpd is light, fast, and unbloated, much like its chosen logo: a paper airplane. It has great Perl, Python, PHP, and even Ruby/Rails support through FastCGI. Though Apache can certainly do everything it can, lighttpd does it with significantly less overhead and memory usage, making it especially ideal for high-bandwidth websites which work primarily with large 1MB+ files.

My only qualm is the lack of .htaccess (a huge selling point for Apache) and its confusing and non-directory specific mod_rewrite implementation.

Nothing matches it in terms of scalability.

My biggest compliment is that the config file is reasonably simple. No more incomprehensible Apache config file bs... yay! It's a stable server with decent scalability. No complaints.