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Comment by paraboul | Hacker News Reader

Looks impressive though benchmarking with "ab" should be taken with a grain of salt.

nginx does a lot of optimization at many level that ab can't figure out.

In short, it only profiles the speed of the HTTP parser and certainly not the network stack.

There are a lot of things that a HTTP server does in order to keep the connections stack "steady" : Disabling the Nagle algorithm at the right moment, gracefully handling failure, managing slow clients the right way, ...

FWIW, Tsung is an awesome benchmarking tool written in erlang : http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/

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ab is also very slow, it can be the limiting factor in the benchmarking.

But the nginx http parser is one of the things that is fast, so a faster one is interesting.

I think having a library implementation is very useful as well.

Sure! And it supports HTTP/2.0 !

ab has not been the bottleneck in the benchmarks since both servers were pinned to a single core. It is true that ab is too slow for benchmarking a HTTP server running on multiple CPU cores, but it is at least faster than a server only using one core.

Regarding the performance of the HTTP parser, I have heard that picohttpparser (the HTTP/1 parser used by H2O) is much faster than the HTTP parser used by nginx. https://github.com/kazuho/picohttpparser

If that is true, it is likely due to the difference between the approaches the parsers take. Unlike most parsers, picohttpparser does not have a callback-based API. Instead it uses a loop for parsing the HTTP request and header lines.

note: This comment might be biased since I am the author of H2O and picohttpparser.

I believe you when you say that picohttpparser is faster. But is it also correct and secure? Is it fully RFC7230 compliant? Are there no parsing bugs that would allow a security exploit?

It is hard to argue the secureness of a software, but I would say that if there are problems in the library it would be taken seriously.

picohttpparser is the core of HTTP::Parser::XS which is used by many HTTP application servers for Perl (see http://plackperl.org). There are many deployments using it.

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