Howtoforge posted a Lighttpd tutorial for Ubuntu 12.10

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an Ubuntu 12.10 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites. I use PHP-FPM in this tutorial instead of Lighttpd's spawn-fcgi.

  Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 12.10