I’ve been playing around with switching from Apache to lighttpd (lighty) for a while now; one of my dev boxes runs lighty reasonably well.

Couple of things:

– the openSUSE build system has pre-built RPMs for SLES

– PHP support is via FastCGI; it’s not exactly intuitive on SLES – but the correct php5 binary is actually placed into /srv/www/cgi-bin. I moved mine to /usr/bin and renamed it to php5-fastcgi

Some time in the next few days I’ll finally move the production environment live – but right now it’s looking faster and less memory intensive than Apache.