Apache Tomcat vs lighttpd

Overview

lighttpd

Stacks156

Followers133

Votes27

Apache Tomcat

Stacks16.9K

Followers12.6K

Votes201

GitHub Stars8.0K

Forks5.3K

lighttpd vs Apache Tomcat: What are the differences?

What is 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.

What is Apache Tomcat? An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

lighttpd and Apache Tomcat can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

"Lightweight" is the top reason why over 6 developers like lighttpd, while over 76 developers mention "Easy" as the leading cause for choosing Apache Tomcat.

Apache Tomcat is an open source tool with 3.51K GitHub stars and 2.4K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Tomcat's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Apache Tomcat has a broader approval, being mentioned in 566 company stacks & 430 developers stacks; compared to lighttpd, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Advice on lighttpd, Apache Tomcat

Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to

configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly.
Install apache and tomcat.
Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server.
Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports.
Create users on RHEL for application support team.
other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

lighttpd	Apache Tomcat
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.	Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 8.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 5.3K
Stacks 156	Stacks 16.9K
Followers 133	Followers 12.6K
Votes 27	Votes 201
Pros & Cons
Pros 7 Lightweight 6 Easy setup 2 Proxy 2 Open source 2 Virtal hosting	Pros 79 Easy 72 Java 49 Popular 1 Spring web Cons 3 Blocking - each http request block a thread 2 Easy to set up

What are some alternatives to lighttpd, Apache Tomcat?

NGINX

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.

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.

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.

Caddy

Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.

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lighttpd vs Apache Tomcat: What are the differences?

lighttpd and Apache Tomcat can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

"Lightweight" is the top reason why over 6 developers like lighttpd, while over 76 developers mention "Easy" as the leading cause for choosing Apache Tomcat.

Apache Tomcat is an open source tool with 3.51K GitHub stars and 2.4K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Tomcat's open source repository on GitHub.