I faced the challenge to install CakePHP under LightTPD. All works smoothly as long as I deploy projects in document root of domain. But when I want to setup CakePHP in subdir all goes wrong.

Basically, the tutorial involves changing some configuration options in the lighttpd to help it understand the correct routing for the CakePHP application. He even includes a download of the updates to make a drag & drop upgrade easier.

Some days ago I stumbled upon an old entry of Jan in lighty's life, called "X-Sendfile". There he explains how to speed up the delivery of (large) files with lighttpd instead of PHP (YES, lighttpd is very fast - for one customer we created an ImageServer with pure lighty that replaced a 4-server-cluster with Apache and now has 1 server with lighttpd (which is boring around at low load). The box makes 180 Mio. requests per month).

He even gives an example of the functionality, showing how a combination of an entry in the web server's config coupled with a simple PHP script can easily send out a large file to anyone nice and zippy.