Reading the last statistics from "netcraft’s Webserver Survey ":http://survey.netcraft.com/Reports/0612/ lighttpd is #12 of the most used webserver software packages.
But who is running lighttpd and for what purpose ?
The Ranking
The Alexa Global Top 500 lists a few sites which are already known from PoweredByLighttpd in our wiki
#6 is youtube who is using lighttpd for sending out the static content (the images, the videos, …). They use a patched version which handles their load better.
#12 is wikipedia. If you open en.wikipedia.org with firebug and check the “All→Net” tab, you will see upload.wikimedia.org. All the images-work is handed here: thumbnail generation, delivery.
#49 is imageshack.us
SourceForge.net is at #80. The whole site runs on lighttpd. Dynamic content via PHP and the usual static content.
#132 is sendspace.com a huge file-sharing site. They care a lot about concurrent access to a large set of large files. You don’t want to hear their disk-backends seeking. :)
On #221 we have our first brother from the family of torrent sites: mininova.org They are a long running lighttpd user and are leading the group:
… and those were just the ones I could find right away. :)
The Numbers
The December Survey from Netcraft talks about 178,619 detected servers. I know that quite a few of them are domain-hosters which are using a single IP to park a few thousand domain-names.
The Others
But who is behind those numbers ? I have contact to a some of owners of the sites mentioned above and want to write an article about the different users of lighttpd. How they are using it, what they would like to see, what they love, … If you are interested and are listed in Alexa before my personal site drop me a mail at jan@kneschke.de or just add a comment with your mail-address below.
And who is on place #15,276 ?