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Comment by eik3_de | Hacker News Reader

"GWAN isn't designed to be a robust webserver, it's designed to perform exceptionally well in contrived and outlandish benchmarks [...]"

from http://tomoconnor.eu/blogish/gwan-snakeoil-beware/

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Very interesting, and - entertaining. I've had a feeling something was off, looking at the website. If something is too good to be true, it probably is.

Perhaps I'm overly critical and/or cynical, but it's difficult to take this page seriously when there's a graph right at the top showing that IIS 7.0 Windows / C# can handle 0 concurrent users per sec.

Either this is a poor attempt at humor (indicating a naive or dangerous opionated author), or the testing isn't thorough (indicating the author isn't thorough enough to care despite making very bold claims about similar software). Neither lead to very promising conclusions about the quality of the software.

If you look closely, the point is a little past 0, perhaps 5-10.

I've read somewhere that, a laboratory has been able to to acheive this level. I'm unable to find the article to back this claim up, however.

(I'm a .NET developer)

Oh, and their examples are weird. I found this snippet earlier on, and it made me go “Huh?”

    if(s[0] == '%' && s[1] == '2' && s[2] == '0') // escaped space?

That can read past the end of the string if it ends in a '%'. The length check is missing. Maybe it's not such a big deal here, and this is only an example, but if the author's examples are this sloppy, and we can't see the actual source code of his server, then it's hard not to generalise.

It will not read past the string if it's null-terminated.

It took me a moment to figure out why that won't happen. It could use a comment in that place.

That article then proceeds to say absolutely nothing about its performance.

From reading the article, it's clear that repeated tries didn't yield a working server. I'm not surprised that there was no performance testing of something that does not work at all.

I wrote that (the article, rather than the software), incidentally.. The most interesting thing that happened was that it prompted a Disqus flame-war where I was inundated with comments on that post, and a whole bunch of others from G-WAN employees (and their friends - I presume) taking pot-shots.

I realise that my writing style can sometimes be seen as abrasive, but I still don't think that I've done a very good job of explaining my surprise that a) GWAN exists at all, or b) people are actually using it..

I spent a whole weekend trying to get my head inside it, and eventually gave up, after wondering what on earth I was doing.

"G-WAN is the Gentoo of the Application Server field."

False. Gentoo is all about control and configurability.

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