Lighttpd was introduced at the beginning of this book as a lean and fast web server. This chapter will help us make Lighttpd work even faster. Before we start optimizing our Lighttpd installation, there are some things to consider such as where is Lighttpd going to run?

The most tested system with perhaps the most optimized backend is Linux. So if we need to squeeze every little request per second out of a server, it is a sure guess. In fact, apart from Linux, all systems except Windows are quite capable of delivering good performance.

If our Lighttpd runs on a multi-processor machine, it can take advantage of that by spawning multiple versions of itself. Also, most Lighttpd installations will not have a machine to themselves; therefore, we should not only measure the speed but also its resource usage.