hiawatha

„Hiawatha is a webserver for Unix and has been build with security in mind. This resulted in a highly secure webserver, in both code and features. This webserver runs on Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Windows. Although it can run any kind of CGI / FastCGI application, it has been optimized for usage with PHP.“

Quick compare

  Memory 1 Binary 2
hiawatha ~1320 kB ~105 kB
lighttpd ~1768 kB ~409 kB
  1. After one request „Hello world! „
  2. Minimal menuconfig, including libraries, excluding pthread, md5sum
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        105788 Apr 25 20:29 hiawatha
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        150324 Apr 25 10:56 lighttpd
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          5496 Apr 25 10:56 mod_access.so
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         16772 Apr 25 11:11 mod_dirlisting.so
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          6320 Apr 25 10:56 mod_indexfile.so
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         10584 Apr 25 10:56 mod_staticfile.so
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root        219916 Apr 24 08:54 libpcre.so.0.0.1

Security

You might want to add this or similar to the extra configuration:

BanOnGarbage = 300
BanOnMaxPerIP = 60
BanOnMaxReqSize = 300
KickOnBan = yes
RebanDuringBan = yes

And you might want to limit the number of simultaneous connections too:

ConnectionsTotal = 5
ConnectionsPerIP = 3