I've seen people moving from Lighttpd to Apache 2 based on blog posts, etc ..
Then again some people have posted about lighty coming back into favor. I am confused, whats the current favourite ?
Is there one besides these ?
Thanks!
Apache is great for handling incoming traffic, sorting it out and
proxying to more task-specific servers like Mongrel. One of the
reasons Lighty got so popular was that it had a more stable fcgi than
Apache. If you move away from fcgi, then Apache can either proxy to
Pound/Pen or do the balancing itself letting Mongrel serve the actual
Rails pages.
It also might depend on if you have specific requirements out of the servers and what you want to do with them. I'm not sure there is a "best".
If you're looking for good performance and small memory footprint, I can recommend Nginx. If you're looking for good performance, small memory footprint, easy install/maintenance and is apache config compatible I can recommend LiteSpeed.
I hear really good things about the Lighty 1.5 release, I really hope they get some updates to mod_proxy.
I’m in favor of Apache 2.x, personally. But I think that that is more because I already know how to work with apache. I stick with it because what brings the money in is building web pages, not messing with web servers. Apache gets the job done well, since I just use it to front for mongrel. I have been wanting to take a look at NginX though…