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Comment by triangleman | Hacker News Reader

So how do you get a web server to take advantage of a hardware gzip accelerator? Is there like a custom nginx plugin that points to a custom driver? Seems very cool and I've never heard of something like this.

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According to their press release, it was an Apache plugin.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20081008005207/en/Com...

They mention APIs for Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris, a ZLIB, and the Apache module.

http://www.aha.com/DrawProducts.aspx?Action=GetProductDetail...

It was also pretty common in the early days of SSL to have a similar outboard accelerator and webserver plugins to call it.

That still exists for Allwinner CPUs. You can offload the TLS handshake.

That's so cool. Has anyone made a JSON-parsing chip, because I could see that being useful in today's servers.

Is JSON parsing still a bottleneck? https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson

mixing simd and non-simd load is not recommended.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...

this is well-addressed here: https://github.com/simdjson/simdjson/blob/master/doc/perform... .

first off, AVX2 is a subset of SIMD instructions - SIMDjson includes a large number of implementations including several which do not use AVX2 at all.

next, only a subset of AVX2 instructions cause downclocking (namely, the 512 bit wide ones), which SIMDjson does not use. throwing out the use of "SIMD" entirely because you read an article about a specific AVX512 instruction which caused down-clocking might be a bit premature, no?

Lots of NICs for large supercomputers have special message passing offload engines. But JSON is too ASCII and too random to find a reason to accelerate it.

One way to do it is to expose it as an nvme block device. Not sure how that's used from userspace, I suspect it's either the right combination of mmap/vmsplice/sendfile from userspace to do p2pdma between the devices in question or some custom ioctls.

https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC/2019/presentati...

Maybe hooks into libz somehow?

Oooh, that would work; just provide your own libz that's a wrapper around the hardware. You could even package it up and do a drop in replacement:)

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