GeoServer vs lighttpd: What are the differences?

GeoServer: An open source server for sharing geospatial data. It is developed, tested, and supported as community-driven project by a diverse group of individuals and organizations. It is designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards; lighttpd: A secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. 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.

GeoServer and lighttpd can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

GeoServer is an open source tool with 1.59K GitHub stars and 1.31K GitHub forks. Here's a link to GeoServer's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, lighttpd has a broader approval, being mentioned in 19 company stacks & 23 developers stacks; compared to GeoServer, which is listed in 10 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.