For some time now, I have been experiencing weird bugs with my webserver. I was running a lighttpd, version 1.4.22. Two annoying bugs occurred:
The first was more a nuisance when uploading files through a POST, which resulted in error 417 "Expectation failed" on the first attempt (while on the second it worked).
The second bug resulted in a reproducible denial-of-service, as it crashed the webserver. It occurred whenever a firefox-webbrowser attempted to connect to the server through HTTPS.
I hoped these bugs to be solved by upgrading from 1.4.22 to 1.4.23 and 1.4.24, but that did not happen. As I needed a solution to these bugs, I decided to switch from lighttpd to nginx.
The transition went surprisingly smooth. The configuration is a bit more complicated as it was with lighttpd, but easily set up and quite good explained on nginx's website, too.
Now, nginx runs all my websites, interacts with PHP through FastCGI, and problems seem to be gone.
