IBM Developer Works just posted a new article discussing a variety of “lightweight” Web Servers. They analyze a number of servers across a variety of dimensions including performance, scalability, security, flexibility, and manageability. The article explains that “while it’s reasonable to assume the market leaders have been carefully optimized to be effectively unbeatable in performance (for example), many tiny competitors are faster for simple service of static Web pages.” This is in line with the results I found when I ran a comparison between longtime stalwart Apache and lightweight newcomer lighttpd.

Interestingly, the article encourages a practice I’ve been considering for some time for this site: using a lightweight Web server to complement, rather than replace a traditional full-featured server (in this case, Apache). You don’t need Apache to serve slow changing static files such as images, stylesheets, or javascript. Moving these static resources off your primary server to a lightweight alternative can provide a significant performance boost since your primary server (which likely has a large memory footprint) is no longer tied up serving simple static content.

The article looks at several dozen web servers, and mentions the strengths (and some weaknesses) of each. Many of these applications are so tiny that they’re trivial to understand, and really fun to hack on.