I used lighttpd for my previous job because the boss liked. The config language was definitely weird. I had to do a lot of fixups when someone made a well meaning change that didn't work properly because of how conditionals work. Usually informed by experience from when the someone was me.
Re:The long life of Apache httpd 2.4
by Blackthorn on Saturday May 20, 2023 @12:35PM
(#36013335)
I personally ditched lighttpd on my own website (PHP, large traffic, but only a single server) because it had some memory leak that would, over time, result in increasing memory usage and eventually cause the server to chug.
It had not seen any bugfix releases for quite a long time at that point, and nginx was available by then, so I made the swap. I continued to serve that website off of a single server for the rest of its lifetime.
if (st && S_ISREG(st->st_mode)) return HANDLER_GO_ON;
Change it to if (st) without a regular file check, and it works as expected (great) with frameworks like Joomla etc (/administrator URLs, for example)