Rachel presumably wrote her server in a reasonable language like C++ (though I don't see a link to her source), but when I wrote httpdito⁰ ¹ ² I wrote it in assembly, and it can handle 2048 concurrent connections on similarly outdated hardware despite spawning an OS process per connection, more than one concurrent connection per byte of executable†. (It could handle more, but I had to set a limit somewhere.) It just serves files from the filesystem. It of course doesn't use epoll, but maybe it should — instead of Rachel's 50k requests per second, it can only handle about 20k or 30k on my old laptop. IIRC I wrote it in one night.

It might sound like I'm trying to steal her thunder, but mostly what I'm trying to say is she is right. Listen to her. Here is further evidence that she is right.

As I wrote in https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo/blob/master/vector-vm.md, single-threaded nonvectorized C wastes on the order of 97% of your computer's computational power, and typical interpreted languages like Python waste about 99.9% of it. There's a huge amount of potential that's going untapped.

I feel like with modern technologies like LuaJIT, LevelDB, ØMQ, FlatBuffers, ISPC, seL4, and of course modern Linux, we ought to be able to do a lot of things that we couldn't even imagine doing in 2005, because they would have been far too inefficient. But our imaginations are still too limited, and industry is not doing a very good job of imagining things.

—

⁰ http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s

¹ http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/httpdito-readme

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6908064

† It's actually bloated up to 2060 bytes now because I added PDF and CSS content-types to it, but you can git clone the .git subdirectory and check out the older versions that were under 2000 bytes.