Apache has ruled the web since the mid-90s, but not all users are happy with it. Recent competitors Cherokee and Lighttpd offer an uncomplicated alternative for users who are looking for something light.
Apache is so predominant among Unix-style web servers that most people wouldn’t dream of looking for alternatives. On the other hand, the Apache server carries much ballast, some of which dates back to its previous life as the NCSA-HTTPD. For example, the Apache developers kept the multi-process model with a fixed number of pre-launched server instances until version 2. Now there is a variant that uses multiple threads to process requests; then again, this new construction has added to the existing codebase, which can lead to inefficiencies. In this article, I examine a pair of promising Apache alternatives.
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