Lighttpd is a high speed web server, which is designed and optimized for high performance environments. It scales several times better with the same hardware compared with other web servers.

If you would like to learn and test Lighttpd, refer the following link.

How to install, configure and use Lighttpd in Linux

What’s New in this release?

lighttpd now performs strict URL parsing and normalization on HTTP requests. This is configurable, but the defaults are now strict unless explicitly configured otherwise.

Enabling strict URL parsing and normalization by default provides more consistent behavior for mod_redirect and mod_rewrite, which match against the (url-encoded) URL request.

behavior change: mod_webdav now rejects partial PUT (configurable)

mod_auth: HTTP Auth Digest algorithm=SHA-256

mod_webdav: major rewrite: robustness, performance, RFC compliance

mod_maxminddb: new; obsoletes discontinued mod_geoip

There are numerious performance enhancements, bug fixes

Close to 150 changes has been made on this release compared with previous release version.

The recommended settings for server.http-parseopts are the following, unless specific use requires looser settings:

  server.http-parseopts = (
    "header-strict"            => "enable",
    "host-strict"              => "enable",
    "host-normalize"           => "enable",
    "url-normalize"            => "enable",
    "url-normalize-unreserved" => "enable",
    "url-normalize-required"   => "enable",
    "url-ctrls-reject"         => "enable",
    "url-path-2f-decode"       => "enable",
    "url-path-dotseg-remove"   => "enable",
    "url-query-20-plus"        => "enable"
  )

Useful Links:

Lighttpd Home page
Lighttpd 1.4.54 release notes