lighty's life

Hey folks,

back in december, we posted about a new lighty branch and opened up our project to the public: http://redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/lighttpd-sandbox

It’s still not in a fully useable state yet, but we have been very busy and made huge progress meanwhile. Look what we had last time:

• the config handling is pretty complete
• basic connection handling including throttling and keep-alive/IO timeouts works
• error logging works (introducing multiple error log levels and targets)
• module/plugin interface mostly done
• completely multithreaded
• serves static files

Apart from some minor features we can now say the core is almost done with just small changes or optimizations to it. We now start to add functionality to the core via modules and following ones already work pretty well:

• mod_accesslog
• mod_auth (auth-basic with plaintext files working)
• mod_dirlist
• mod_expire
• mod_fastcgi (working pretty well already, giving usability a big boost!)
• mod_openssl (ssl functionality provided through openssl)
• mod_redirect (more powerful than in 1.x)
• mod_rewrite (also more powerful than in 1.x)
• mod_status
• mod_vhost (virtual hosts, plenty of options and possibilities; combines mod_simple_vhost and mod_evhost plus more)

Performance seems to be really great so far. Thanks to being fully multithreaded, lighty 2.0 scales nicely with multicore CPUs.
It can handle several hundred thousand requests per second on a new Intel i7 (for really small static files, on localhost, not a great benchmark :P).

Let me tell you, alot has changed! And of course you’re welcome to test and have a look at its current state. But – just like last time – the forum as well as ticket/issue tracking is still disabled for it because we are not capable of providing any support as well as getting things done within a reasonable amount of time – so we focus on getting things done. :)

Some people might already be able to do basic stuff like serving static files, maybe play with fastcgi a little. As the config and design completely differs from 1.x you might already want to take a look or “test ride”. Remember: No support at the moment. :-)

We can’t (and really don’t want to) provide any specific release date but hope to have 2.0 in a usable state by the end of the year. Remember we do this in our free time for fun.

As for lighty 1.4 and 1.5: everything will continue like before – no worries.

This is it for today.

Thanks for flying light.