[ILUG] Lightweight webserver

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

On Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 11:27:49PM +0000, Niall O Broin wrote:
> On Sunday 8 February 2004, colm at stdlib.net (Colm MacCarthaigh) wrote:
> 
> >> OK - I did wonder about. I thought perhaps people had just got bored
> >> with the "our dick is bigger than IIS' dick" thing.
> >
> >Well IIS had in-kernel zero-copy going on before Linux could ever offer
> >it, have to give them that ;)
> 
> That I knew, hence the comment, and the existence of khttpd, which was
> to level the playing field web server benchmark wise. I guess, as you
> (or somebody else) mentioned earlier, the existence of sendfile now
> gives any webserver the zero-copy advantage, hence the need for khttpd
> going.

There was another reason aswell, NT/2k/2k3 have a magic version of
accept() called AcceptHTTP() (or something equally mad) that means the
kernel handles the handshake and the initial HTTP request, which in
theory means less context switching, and less calls to read(). Apache2
uses it on windows too these days, but I don't think anyone can ramp it
up to the levels webservers get to on Linux/BSD.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net