lighty's life: Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites

Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites

jan — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 23:03:00 +0100

Reading the last statistics from netcraft’s Webserver Survey 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 ?

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by GreenJolly

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:41:46 +0100

Torrent sites are very popular now, and they are the global problem for providers with heavy bandwidth.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by Torrent sites in top list

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 11:07:16 +0100

torrent sires in top lists. that's unexpected.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by servertweak.com

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:08:11 +0100

Re meirab's comment. I can't see why you can't, putting all of the files into a NAS file storage system and have lighty on different servers connect to the NAS server isn't that hard is it? However I'd be more worried about the harddrive throughput if your talking about serving static files over a number of servers. The amount of CPU lighty consumes is next to nothing. Raiding all servers and having a syncing cron sync all of the servers at once can also work =)

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by meirab@bigfoot.com

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:51:36 +0100

i read that " Lighttpd powers 5 Alexa Top 250 sites 10 " i don't know how can "Lighttpd" do it from 1 webserver, i believe that big sites need some way of parallel web serving in order to serve many web connections at once. can "Lighttpd" be installed over multiple webservers and act as one site? or multiple "Lighttpd" webservers can be connected with an application sever (iron) like the ones from: F5 or RADWARE?

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by MasalaGuru (NSFW)

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:27:14 +0100

We started using lighty as a proxy behind apache after the big brother gave up trying to serve all those images and flv's.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by Andre Bogus

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 15:02:36 +0100

fxn: They will have their reasons. My guess: 1. the advantage of streaming grows with file size - the snippets YouTube serves are usually not huge. 2. streaming is not supported with all clients.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by fxn

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 13:31:23 +0100

So, if serving videos without streaming is fine for a site such as YouTube, when is streaming worthwile for static content? Isn't streaming theoretically better?

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by Paul

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:05:17 +0100

I believe http://penny-arcade.com uses you guys as well to run an RoR app.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by Jan Kneschke

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 10:57:21 +0100

They simply push it out.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by YouTube

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 10:38:00 +0100

Do they use the FLV streamer or do they simply send videos?

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by Jan Kneschke

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 10:35:11 +0100

CC, right. I fixed that.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by cc

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 06:49:11 +0100

Are you sure that's mininova.com? They look scammy. You probably meant mininova.org.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by http://www.bubbleshare.com/

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 03:39:16 +0100

Congratulations. We use and LOVE Lighty at BubbleShare. We serve both static content (images) as well as our Rails app from it.

"Lighttpd powers 6 Alexa Top 250 sites" by http://www.bubbleshare.com/

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 03:39:16 +0100

Congratulations. We use and LOVE Lighty at BubbleShare. We serve both static content (images) as well as our Rails app from it.