Anyone using lighttpd?

[willeffects]

sharing some experience first:
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We just setup our image server to use thttpd on a very graphic heavy page (few hundred small images per page). We noticed that we did not see the cpu or memory increase from apache that we expected. We also noticed that it took longer to load all the images on the page (watching the "connecting to ..." flash at the bottom much more then it did in apache.

I installed the "Tweak Network Settings" extension for firefox turned up my max connections and found that the images loaded now much faster then they ever did in Apache.

So started doing more research on the HTTP 1.0/1.1 max connections limitation and have come to understand that the persistant connections and pipelining features are very important. Unfortunately thttpd doesnt support these in their active package (though you can use a 3rd party patch of an older version, or pay for "premium thttpd").

We also found some scripts had problems because thttpd did not return the expected headers; this was extremely hard to track down and caused crashes in our apache server.
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Im now looking for another fast webserver that supports these features. Lighttpd seems to come up quite a bit in my research. Has anyone used it for image heavy pages as an image server or any other recommendations?

Thanks,
Will