Cherokee Webserver, "The Fastest", Really? | Hacker News Reader

Cherokee Webserver, "The Fastest", Really?

forum.gwan.com

19 pointsrlander14 comments

Any claims about "fastest webserver" also need to add the qualifier "free".

Because I believe litespeed is faster, though the free version has a simultaneous connection limit.

It's even faster than nginx in some cases.

http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2010/01/06/benchmark-compariso...

Also, litespeed is practically a drop-in replacement for apache since it can obey httpd.conf and .htaccess files which no other webserver bothers to try to do. You can be converted to it in less than an hour (optionally along with apache in the background on another port). If you have a bunch of rewrite rules, other webservers are a complete workout to convert to. (They've also gone to great lengths to make it play nice with cpanel)

I second that - one client of mine has been using the free version for years to host a couple of rails app and are very happy with it.

For Rails work these days though, I'm using passenger with either nginx or apache.

The author of g-wan appears to be quite paranoid about his competitors...

http://gwan.ch/en_jihad.html http://gwan.ch/en_complexity.html

Being paranoid doesn't mean they are not out to get you.

I mean if this http://gwan.com/en_dns.html happened to me I would be paranoid too.

Forgive my ignorance, but when does this actually matter? My application can't run anywhere near that speed, so time spent at the webserver level is less than 1% of the total response...

For static files or cached pages, I can maybe understand the fuss.

"G-WAN is fully functional for an unlimited time at no cost for personal use, individual use, non-profit use, academic use, commercial and non-commercial use or any combination of these (no call-home, no spyware, no backdoor included)."

G-WAN is proprietary software, using "C" servlet for writing extension and is not very clear about the exact HTTP version supported.

On the other hand, Cherokee is free software (GNU General Public License), supports many handlers, includes many modules like reverse proxy and has a decent speed over Apache HTTPD.

Why would I pick the "The Fastest" when you have a full-featured, free, standard HTTP server that is already "Fast enough"?

I care more about concurrency than "speed". nginx is better at concurrency than Cherokee and most other webservers. Oh well.

How is nginx' concurrency achieved? Does it use something like libev/libevent ?

Nginx has an evented I/O architecture. libev/libevent implement evented I/O but evented architectures have got nothing to do with libev/libevent per se.

nginx uses native evented I/O provided by the operating system (epoll on Linux, kqueue on *BSD, /dev/poll and event ports on Solaris, input/output completion port on Windows).

libevent and libev provide abstraction layer for those mechanisms and unified interface for all supported operating systems.

> native evented I/O API provided by operating system

I know it's just semantics but I recently learned that some people actually believe that synchronous I/O API provided by OS is actually… well synchronous I/O. Obviously there cannot be any synchronous I/O going on in any modern operating system.

Gwan is using C based scripting, I guess security would be an issue if you are writing too much website logic in C.

The benchmarks they link to are from 2008. Not sure what the fuss is about.

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