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:

Dec 08:

• 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.

The dev team has gotten some new members recently that you might not know of. Here’s a heads up (in alphabetical order):

• hoffie
• icy
• nitrox
• stbuehler

If you hang out in #lighttpd, you will already know these names.

That being said, there is also some news about the state of the development of lighty.

Lighty is a great webserver and we all love it. But if you use it for quite some time, you’ll eventually find out that it’s not perfect. There are some oddities and shortcomings that cannot be ironed out without rewriting a significant part of the core.

This is where I had the idea to start all over. With lessons learned from the past, we could write a new version of lighty that fixes the design issues the current versions have. But at the same time keep all the good stuff and remain fairly compatible. The main idea to be fast and lightweight is still valid and if you are familiar with 1.4.x or 1.5, you will have no problems with the new version.

Jan had the idea to use glib for stuff like strings/buffers and arrays. He wanted to rewrite the corresponding parts and did so in a branch of his. I proposed to take this even further and use glib throughout the source. It makes coding easier, faster and in the end more secure because you can rely on proven and well tested source.

stbuehler jumped in and created a new branch where he started to hack on an all new lighty using the ideas from above. The following days we discussed a lot – and still do so – about the new design. What we could do better, what shortcomings we wanted to fix.

The result is nothing less but a more flexible and faster design for lighty.

This sounds awesome but where is the catch you might think. Well, currently we have not too much code ready but we are actively hacking on it. Do not ask when it will be released, there is no estimated date. We are still at the very beginning of the new version but hope to have it some day become the official Lighttpd 2.0

We created a page that lists some of the (technical) plans we currently have. You might find some of them interesting.

This is it for today folks. Hope you like the route we are taking and maybe drop us a line in #lighttpd (freenode) or in the comments.

- update -

To make it clear: 1.5 or 1..4 have not been dropped. If you think 1.5 is unstable and you get a segfault or something like that, then tell us. File a ticket, attach a stacktrace and document the problem in a detailed way so it can be fixed. Thanks for using lighty.