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I do web development so I normally have web sharing turned on in the sharing preferences.

After upgrading to Lion I have been continuing with the web development projects I have pretty much as normal. However, I noticed something weird today. I'm not doing development at the moment so I thought I could save some system resources by going into the preferences and turning web sharing off for now. However when I did, I found that web sharing was already unchecked! Sure enough, I could access web pages and scripts on localhost. I turned web sharing on and off again and localhost files could no longer be accessed, as expected.

I tried restarting the machine to see what effect that would have, and sure enough, Apache started up and was running when I got to the desktop even though web sharing was disabled. Enabling and disabling it again shut the server down.

So a few questions occur:

  1. Why is Apache running if web sharing is turned off?
  2. Is this something I need to worry about and/or fix?
  3. If this is something that needs to be fixed, then how?
  4. Are there any other services that Lion starts up that it doesn't tell the user about?
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Are you sure didn't install a second parallel installation of Apache? I'm thinking of Mamp, or through Macports perhaps? – Gerry Nov 14 '11 at 14:16
nope. It's purely Apple's Apache, with the Liip PHP build – GordonM Nov 14 '11 at 14:23

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