On Solaris/OpenSolaris, if you are starting lighttpd as a non-root user and using solaris-devpoll as the event-handler then you'll hit the issue that you describe. Until a fix is in place I'd suggest starting Lighttpd as root and specifying the user/group to run as in the Lighttpd config file. When you do this, Lighttpd does all of it's initialization as root and then starts the Web Server process and any worker processes as the user that you specify. You can then use "solaris-devpoll" as the event-handler which is the recommended option for Solaris. This is a better option than falling back to using "poll" as the event-handler.

Are you using SMF to start Lighttpd? I'm just curious as I started looking into this in response to a problem seen when starting Lighttpd via SMF.

Amanda