That’s where Lighttpd comes in. It’s ,according to its site,

�designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems”

Anyways, what we’re interested in is the small memory footprint and the effective management of the cpu-load part.

Installation

We need to get and install lighttpd, PHP and MySQL:

Guides available from:
Instructions from Lighttpd Trac
Lighttpd installation instructions from *Nix Craft
Lighttpd+PHP+Perl+MySQL installation guide for Windows users
Lighttpd+PHP+MySQL Installation guide for Ubuntu
A few notes:

• The settings for fastcgi suggested on the Lighttpd wiki will load a large number of php-cgi process that you probably will not be using. I’ll probably suggest you set

  "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "2"

  instead of

  "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16"

  You can make adjustments later if you feel the need.

• You need to modify the default my.cnf to make things a bit more effcient. You can follow this guide to get you started.

Does it help to use lighttpd instead of apache? Yeah, it does. I’ve been using it for the last couple of weeks and it’s been able to handle my requirements without problem. My final opinion? Well, it is not as full featured as apache but if you have a limited memory budget or are just looking for a lean mean web server, you really should take a good look at lighttpd. Now if you don’t mind, some of us have real work to do and can’t spend all day reading other people’s blogs .