I am looking for a small web server for small websites like Non-Windows online Bank Compatibility information in China. I compared some small web server by trying them. Guessing my findings are probably too trivial to merge into wikipedia's comparision of web servers, frustracted that ACME's more detailed comparision focusing on light web servers being not an editable wiki, I share my note here for those who find ways to here by Google.
| Features | basic feature?* | Boa | bozohttpd |
|---|---|---|---|
| Support Default Charset setting | Yes | Yes | No |
| Works with URI that contain 8-bit character | Yes | No | Yes |
| virtual hosts | Yes | name and IP based | name based |
| content negociation on mime type | Yes | No | No |
| recognize XHTML | Yes | Seems not | No |
| Directory Listing | No | ? | No |
| support content-encoding for compressed content | No | Seems yes | Yes |
| CGI | No | Yes | Yes |
* Basic feature means the feature I personally think should be considered mandantory requirement for any working web server, even the minimal ones.
It seems a bit difficult to find someone like me interested in using a small minimal web server while not caring about wheather or not the server use pre-fork, single process and a few hundred KB difference on executable size, but care about something really essential for the heath of the web, e.g. content negociating and I18N support. Well if you are reading this page, you probably are one of them.