Linux and Open Source | Main / Installing-lighttpd-fast-lightweight-to-apache

Lighttpd - is fast and lightweight alternative to apache. It is secure, fast, compliant and very flexible webserver, which is optimized for high-performance.

It has very low memory footprint compared to other webservers.
For debain the following get's installed when you install lighttpd

      http://in.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/universe libterm-readline-perl-perl 1.0302-1 [52.0kB]
      http://in.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/universe lighttpd 1.4.18-1ubuntu1 [301kB]
      http://in.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/universe lighttpd 1.4.18-1ubuntu1 [301k

Once installed and started, when you access http://localhost/, you will get the following docs.

Unless you changed its configuration, your new server is configured as follows:

Configuration files can be found in /etc/lighttpd. Please read /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/README file.
The DocumentRoot, which is the directory under which all your HTML files should exist, is set to /var/www.
CGI scripts are looked for in /usr/lib/cgi-bin, which is where Debian packages will place their scripts. You can enable cgi module by using command "lighty-enable-mod cgi".
Log files are placed in /var/log/lighttpd, and will be rotated weekly. The frequency of rotation can be easily changed by editing /etc/logrotate.d/lighttpd.
The default directory index is index.html, meaning that requests for a directory /foo/bar/ will give the contents of the file /var/www/foo/bar/index.html if it exists (assuming that /var/www is your DocumentRoot).
You can enable user directories by using command "lighty-enable-mod userdir"