lighttpd serves static files and reverse-proxies to FastCGI backends with a tiny memory footprint — popular on embedded devices, CDNs, and high-traffic sites before nginxA high-performance web server and reverse proxy — event-driven design for massive concurrency. dominated. YouTube and WikipediaA free, collaboratively edited encyclopedia on the web — one of the largest reference works ever built. reportedly used it in early scale-ups. Example: lighttpd on port 80 proxying to PHP-FPM workers for a WordPressA PHP CMS powering millions of sites — themes, plugins, and the block editor for publishing. cluster.

lighttpd proved async web servers could handle thousands of parallel connections on modest hardware.

It influenced nginxA high-performance web server and reverse proxy — event-driven design for massive concurrency. and the event-driven server designs that replaced Apache prefork at scale.