The joy of software
I finally snapped and replaced Apache on my web server, after several weeks of looking at other web servers and trying to figure out which ones provided the features I wanted (multiple userdirs, cgi support, intelligible documentation, smaller runtime than apache has) I finally decided to try out lighttpd, which, despite having a website that makes up for its weakness in documentation by excessive backpatting does allow me to have multiple userdirs (and has enough chrome on it to let me do hotlink blocking and, after much pounding of my head against the wall because the documentation sucks, http auth.)
I don’t know if it’s faster than apache. But it is smaller (1× 2.4mb binary vs. 4-8×7mb binaries, each of which terminated by signal 11 several hundred times a day) and the config file, if somewhat badly-documented, is about 5 times smaller than the corresponding apache one.
And it’s got some interesting quirks to it. One of them is that my weblog software sets up a posting script in the userdir which is actually a symlink to the actual script in the public cgi-bin. If that actual script isn’t world readable, lighttpd will silently 403 it until I walk over to cgi-bin and a+r the stupid thing.
sigh
But at least it’s small. It’s not thttpd, but it’s good enough for now.