So you upgraded your server, or just all of a sudden you try to start lighttpd, it says the server started ok, but you check and there’s no lighttpd process.
You then go after your error log files, and nothing… what the fuck is happening?
try this to attempt to debug.
sudo strace -ff /usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf
In my case the output showed me lighttpd was having permission issues trying to access a log file…
[pid 28073] close(5) = 0
[pid 28073] munmap(0x7fe884c71000, 4096) = 0
[pid 28073] write(3, "2015-02-04 11:04:23: (log.c.164)"..., 49) = 49
[pid 28073] close(2) = 0
[pid 28073] open("/dev/null", O_RDWR) = 2
[pid 28073] brk(0x2203000) = 0x2203000
[pid 28073] open("/home/bh/access.log", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND, 0644) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
[pid 28073] write(3, "2015-02-04 11:04:23: (log.c.118)"..., 98) = 98
[pid 28073] write(3, "2015-02-04 11:04:23: (server.c.1"..., 83) = 83