According to the latest Netcraft survey statistics from 1st of February, 2007, Jan Kneschke’s little baby lighttpd is showing a steady growth, with currently serving 702712 servers which is a tremendous growth compared to January 2007 (only 172819 servers).

Who uses lighttpd? The homepage names a few:

lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, wikipedia and meebo. Its high speed io-infrastructure allows them to scale several times better with the same hardware than with alternative webservers.

lighttpd features a „faster FastCGI“, a COMET implementation and optimized high-speed features. Furthermore, it’s the ideal candidate for scaling out your PHP application (and getting the benefit of a fast download mechanism at no costs compared to Zend Download Server). Applications like Chorizo! or websites like sevenload (video sharing startup in Europe) are using it as their ground base for their high-speed applications.

Just give it a try. If you’re bound to Apache, just try using lighttpd as a load-balanced reverse-proxy for scaling out your Apache based applications? Or, separating your file downloads and static images into a lighttpd based powerhouse?