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I think this is really cool. For simple stuff where you just want light and fast, it's good to see an ASM rewrite.

Light? Sure

Fast? Nope. Look at http_write_response for example - it does 5 syscalls instead of 2 required. And there is no caching headers support, so the browser will download things more than necessary.

For simple things, I highly recommend a small C-based server. This server has educational value only.

Check out "filed" [0] for a small C webserver that does a lot to be fast.

[0] http://filed.rkeene.org/

One thread per request doesn’t scale and becomes inefficient once there are too many requests because of the context switching.

This depends on the scenario. Before the async revolution most app servers were using this model and I’m sure that a very significant portion of the current internet is served with this model.

It may not be the fastest in all cases but I still find it way easier to build something with this model than with async-everything.

nginx is impressively efficient. Compared to Apache, they did a lot of tricks to optimize their HTTP request parsing code. Their concurrency model is brilliant.

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