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Comment by theknown99 | Hacker News Reader

Not really true unless you use crappy software.

I run a few thousand simultaneous connections on AWS small instances without any issues. (HTTP + HTTPS).

The key is writing good software. Which a lot of programmers are still really bad at.

You know, it's cute when somebody who wasn't even born when I started writing software for servers tries to discredit me.

It would be better if you both gave more details on what and how you do so the possible mistakes from both sides could be pointed out and we could learn from them.

From a quick glance on your post, I too suspect there is something wrong - your performance shouldn't be that bad, but there is not enough information to point where.

That's really too long to list, I could conceivably write a book about it.

But, fortunately it's relatively easy to test. You get whatever server you prefer, and install nginx and install a bunch of performance testing tools (like siege, ab etc.) and then you test different concurrency load scenarios.

No custom software, and widely regarded the fastest webserver out there.

As I pointed elsewhere, most recent servers are just overgrown IBM 5150 PCs, with much faster CPUs, immense amounts of memory and storage and somewhat faster buses. They are desktop PCs misused as servers.

> and install nginx

Yeah there's your problem...

You can replicate the exact same experience (only worse) with any other webserver like apache, lighttpd, cherokee, etc.

Tux may be a bit faster, but it can't serve dynamic content nearly as fast as it serves files, so that's pretty much useless.

Have you tried other operating systems?

Have you tried writing your own webserver? Then tuning it to your particular use case?

Yes

hmm so I've written a webserver and am able to get thousands of concurrent requests on a small amazon instance without issues.

And you've written a webserver and you can't.

Interesting...

Can we see your results?

It's cute when you make ridiculous assumptions about when people were born.

Lets stick to the facts...

You stated that Amazon instances couldn't cope. They can. They can cope just fine with thousands of simultaneous HTTP and HTTPS connections. If you can't get your amazon instance to do this, you're using crappy software.

> "The 10k problem is still not solved. A run of the mill VPS typically manages around 1k simultaneous connections and 10k requests/s. That is, over plain http. Over TLS this goes down to about 100 connections and 600 requests/s. A cheap amazon instance will usually be around 1/5th of all that."

Where the hell are you getting those poor figures from? Are you using Lisp or something?

> "and the prevalent implementation (OpenSSL) is not written for high performance servers (it basically dictates that you run blocking sockets in a thread per connection)."

Again - you're using crappy software. Don't use it.

The 10k problem is historically interesting, but for anyone who knows how to program, it's not really an issue.

If you use anything like Apache, lighttpd, Cherokee, Nginx, Tux, etc. they all use OpenSSL, and nothing else.

Well don't use them then!

Seriously. Writing a webserver isn't a big job. It's not very hard to program something that runs better than the ones you list, for specific use cases.

Been there done that, but the fact is, there is no alternative to OpenSSL I could see if you want to have SSL/TLS 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3.

If only there was a way to replace the functionality provided by OpenSSL, by writing some code :(

To rewrite OpenSSL you'll need to be a security and cryptography programmer. And even if you are, the task is daunting to say the least.

Any reason why none of the open implementations listed here are suitable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TLS_implementatio...

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