Overview

NGINX

Stacks114.7K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Cherokee

Stacks4

Followers26

Votes4

lighttpd

Stacks148

Followers133

Votes27

Cherokee vs lighttpd vs nginx: What are the differences?

# Introduction

The key differences between Cherokee, lighttpd, and nginx are highlighted below:

1. **Configuration Flexibility**: Cherokee offers a user-friendly web interface for configuration, making it easy to set up and manage. Lighttpd, known for its simplicity, also provides flexibility but lacks a graphical interface. Nginx, on the other hand, focuses on performance and scalability, with a complex configuration syntax that requires more expertise to set up.

2. **Performance and Scalability**: Cherokee is designed to be lightweight and efficient, suitable for small projects or personal use. Lighttpd is known for its speed and ability to handle a large number of connections, making it popular for high-traffic websites. Nginx is highly regarded for its performance in serving static content, caching, and handling a large number of concurrent requests.

3. **Modules and Extensibility**: Cherokee supports a wide range of modules for various functionalities, such as PHP, Python, and Ruby, providing flexibility in application development. Lighttpd has a modular architecture that allows the addition of features like FastCGI and rewrite rules to optimize performance. Nginx's modular design enables the addition of third-party modules and extensions for advanced functionality.

4. **Configuration Syntax**: Cherokee uses a simple configuration syntax that is easy to understand and modify, suitable for beginners or those with basic web server knowledge. Lighttpd employs a configuration format similar to Apache, making it familiar to users already accustomed to Apache's setup. Nginx utilizes a non-blocking event-driven architecture and a declarative configuration language, offering advanced control over server behavior.

5. **Community and Support**: Cherokee has a smaller community compared to other web servers, which may limit the availability of resources and third-party modules. Lighttpd has a dedicated user base and active community support, with frequent updates and documentation. Nginx boasts a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, support forums, and a wealth of third-party modules.

6. **Security Features**: Cherokee offers basic security features like SSL support and access control, suitable for most web projects. Lighttpd includes advanced security features like chroot support and modsec-based WAF integration, enhancing server security. Nginx is known for its robust security features, including rate limiting, IP whitelisting, and advanced TLS configurations, making it a popular choice for secure web applications.

In Summary, the key differences between Cherokee, lighttpd, and nginx lie in their configuration flexibility, performance and scalability, modules and extensibility, configuration syntax, community and support, and security features.

Advice on NGINX, Cherokee, lighttpd

Daniel

Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development

May 25, 2021

Decided

For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.

We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.

We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.

289k views289k

Comments

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k

Comments

Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided

Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.

429k views429k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	Cherokee	lighttpd
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.	Cherokee is highly efficient, extremely lightweight and provides rock solid stability. Among its many features there is one that deserves special credit: a user friendly interface called cherokee-admin that is provided for a no-hassle configuration of every single feature of the server.	lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 114.7K	Stacks 4	Stacks 148
Followers 61.9K	Followers 26	Followers 133
Votes 5.5K	Votes 4	Votes 27
Pros & Cons
Pros 1452 High-performance http server 894 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	Pros 4 The logo is cute	Pros 7 Lightweight 6 Easy setup 2 Virtal hosting 2 Simplicity 2 Full featured

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Cherokee, lighttpd?

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Microsoft IIS

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.