Shabir Imam’s Blog

Light Weight Web Servers (Light weight alternatives to apache)

Lightweight web servers are Web servers which have been designed to run with very small resource overhead because of hardware, environment, or simply for the challenge of it.
Based on my research, following are the list of few web serves, which looks nice to me, based on few parameters like performance, resource utilization, size, active development, security etc.. Also, most of them are free and open source.
Lighttpd:- www.lighttpd.net
Nignix:- www.nginx.net
Cherokee:-www.cherokee-project.com
Thttpd:- www.acme.com/software/thttpd
Mathpod www.acme.com/software/thttpd
Jetty:- www.mortbay.org/jetty
Yaws:- http://yaws.hyber.org
mini_httpd:- www.acme.com/software/mini_httpd

But the above list is very small and you can find lot of others light web servers which suits your requirement.

Out of the above list, Lighttpd and Ngnix are the two most popular free, open source light weight web servers.
Comparison between these two servers:
http://hostingfu.com/article/nginx-vs-lighttpd-for-a-small-vps
http://superjared.com/entry/benching-lighttpd-vs-nginx-static-files/
http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Lighttpd_vs_nginx

Comparison of different light weight web servers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_servers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_servers

List of web servers:
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/apachealternatives.htm
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Internet/WebServers/Mini_Servers