Is lighttpd really that light?

I've done a few server installs over the past few months where the install called for a web server. Whether it was an application needing a web interface, or the application was a web application, sometimes a web server was needed. In those instances, if the application did not have a heavy dependency on Apache I'd install Lighttpd instead. It has a smaller footprint, is more efficient, faster, and has built-in support for FastCGI.

Today I went to install Lighttpd on a new server and realized it might not be so lightweight. The server was a fresh, minimal, install of Ubuntu, so had only installed what was absolutely needed up to that point, which included a stripped down version of Perl. As part of installing Lighttpd, it wanted to install a couple Perl modules, which meant that the full Perl installation was needed, along with all the default Perl modules. Total weight? 25.1MB installed. An Apache install would have only taken about 7MB at this point.

However, to be fair, in an environment where other requirements are already installed, Lighttpd would only have required an extra 1MB and Apache would have needed about 4MB. Also, I'm sure something else would have needed to install Perl along the line anyway, it was just a little shocking to see the footprint for a "slim" server need so much space.

And, yes, I still went with Lighttpd.