Serving static files with lighttpd
WeBWorK servers experiencing high loads may optionally install the lightweight webserver lighttpd to serve static files. According to the lighttpd documentation,
lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. It 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.[1]
Installation of lighttpd may be done at any time and your active courses will continue to function seemingly without change. The only change behind the scenes will be that static images and pages will be served by a light weight web server. However, installation of lighttpd as described here does come with one caution: the default security settings of some web browsers and some university firewall configurations have been reported to block images served through a different port than port 80. See below.
Contents
Installation and configuration
You must first install lighttpd according to the instructions for your operating system. Installation packages are available for Ubuntu and Debian, Red Hat and Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, and a FreeBSD port of httpd is also available. Links to those packages and installation instructions are available in the lighttpd installation documentation.
Potential problems
Forum discussions
- images will not load (off campus) 23 Aug 2011
- some students can't load images 10 Sept 2009
- images not displaying 9 Apr 2009
- installation questions
External links
References
[Category:Administrators] [Category:Installation]
