Yes, I think lighttpd spawns fastcgi process directly. It's called
"External Spawning" if you use spawn-fcgi.

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:24 AM, jlist9 <jlist9@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if lighttpd is launching fcgi processes directly or it's doing
> that via spawn-fcgi (I think it's directly) but it looks the same to me, in
> the sense that I don't have to worry about the back-end processes.
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong - my understanding is that spawn-fcgi
> is just a launcher. It doesn't really "manage" any of the process it launches.
> When a fcgi process exits, lighttpd will launch another one. When no
> fcgi process is running, lighttpd will start them. When lighttpd quits, it
> will stop all the back-end processes it started. I think it's fair to say
> that lighttpd is managing these processes.
>
>
>> AFAIK lighty just "talks" to the spawnfcgi daemon. Nginx could maybe do the
>> same with a plugin, but it wouldn't be managing the fastcgi processes
>> itself.
>