Color me old and skeptical about "simple," "lightweight" web servers. Does anyone else remember when nginx was touted as the "lightweight" replacement for Apache because Apache was often "overkill"? (e.g. http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/11/a-faster-web-server-... )

Now it's this new httpd that is lighter than bloated nginx.

So, maybe nginx and apache and all the other webservers out there are too big and bloated and sloppy, despite being written by smart people and used to deliver many many performant websites. That's possible.

But it is also possible that, because programmers love to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel rather than reading and understanding other people's code and rather than researching other domains, they tend to create weak web servers and tout them as "lightweight" until eventually they either die or evolve to be useful to people who actually understand the nuances of serving resources over the web, at which point they get accused of "featuritis" and the cycle repeats.

(See also http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html)