Serving static images thru Lighttpd

Question

Hello, I am trying to build library application. Converting the PDF documents to PNG images. (each page is one PNG file)

So there will be several millions of PNG's going to be there in the server. Number of hits per second will be more than 500 and i have to serve the png's.

1) I am choosing MemcacheDB to maintain the PNG's 2) I am choosing Lightpd server for serving the PNG's

Question: 1) I am new to Lighttpd and don't know how to authenticate each request based on paramters i want to serve pngs or deny the access. What programming language can be used for lighttpd? 2) Did i choose the right option for my requirement?

I don't want to be argumental. Thanks

Answer 1

Probably fastest mechanism in lighttpd would use standard http auth support: http://redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/1/Docs:ModAuth

If you'd rather do something more custom/complex, then you would need to use e.g. FastCGI with your language of choice.

nginx seems to be the webserver getting the majority of the buzz lately, it may be able to serve faster than lighttpd, maybe not. It wouldn't hurt to try both. It also supports standard http auth: http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpAuthBasicModule and you could also use FastCGI with your language of choice if you don't wish to use http auth.