8 ms·

Lwan, a high-performance web server with Lua support

99 points by mattbostock 11y ago

gradschool 11y ago
It seems like a cool project with a nice clean coding style, but the lack of API documentation makes it less inviting. I'm sitting here grepping through the repo without much of an idea of what to try next besides reading the whole code base.
ArnoldP 11y ago
I'm certainly not in the market for a webserver with lua support, but if I were I would definitely be looking at nginx first. May I suggest that you make a subsection/table that delineates why someone would go for this rather than nginx? There is a section that says that if you think of apache/nginx first then that {nginx/apache} is probably best for you, but I think lumping in apache and nginx together may be a mistake, and even if I'm giving preferential treatment to nginx I may be swayed nonetheless.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- poelzi 11y ago
  I think it targets embedded machines which is actually quite nice in c + lua. openwrt uses this combo.
GaiusCoffee 11y ago
Lwan, a backronym for "Lwan Will Annihilate Node.js". Cheeky.
- jacobush 11y ago
  Technically, I think that's a recursive acronym. Backcronym is when something has a name and you after the fact make it into an acronym.
  - draven 11y ago
    According to the FAQ it was suggested a posteriori, so technically it's a recursive backronym!
robbles 11y ago
> Hand-written HTTP request parser Aren't they all hand-written?
- gmmeyer 11y ago
  Yea, I'm not sure why that's a benefit, either. It's like they're trying to sell stuffed animals on Etsy, "hand sewed."
  - acidx 11y ago
    That's not the only joke in the feature list (or the whole page, to be honest.)
- wmf 11y ago
  A few years ago Ragel was all the rage: http://zedshaw.com/archive/ragel-state-charts/ http://zedshaw.com/archive/ragel-state-charts/
- grayrest 11y ago
  More or less. There was a minor parser combinator arms race in the Rust community a few months ago using http parsing as the benchmark and my takeaway (only half paid attention, I haven't needed to write a parser) was that they got to roughly as fast as handwritten C parsers. Example: https://github.com/Geal/nom_benchmarks/tree/master/http https://github.com/Geal/nom_benchmarks/tree/master/http This hasn't translated into actual use in the Rust HTTP libs with hyper and rotor-http using their own handwritten parsers but I still think it might.
cordite 11y ago
Is the name a take on that phony gwan server? (It seemed fast, but it absolutely did not respect unique sessions when I bench'd it.)
- acidx 11y ago
  Kind of. I've tried making the page just as phony, but that's more difficult than it sounds.
ludamad 11y ago
The C API can be used from Lua with LuaJIT, right? It seems like this is the way to go to create the bindings.
- acidx 11y ago
  It's possible with FFI, yes, but it's not the way it's currently done in Lwan.
rdtsc 11y ago
Ha, I remember when we picked nginx because it was small, fast and simple years ago (compared to Apache). It is interesting how the cycle repeats. This is the new fast and simple, kind of what nginx started with.
- VeejayRampay 11y ago
  Doesn't really work with nginx though, a webserver that it still extremely fast and simple.
diskcat 11y ago
Is Lua the new in vogue programming language?
- otabdeveloper 11y ago
  Lua has been the standard extension language in gamedev and adtech for years and years.
- wmt 11y ago
  It was in the 90s, especially after the Dr Dobbs article about it, and tons of late 90s and early 2000s games, like Grim Fandango, Baldurs Gate and Escape from Monkey Island used Lua due to its hotness.
  - ewmailing 11y ago
    Actually, Grim Fandango was the very first known game to use Lua and wasn't due to any hotness. Bret Mogilefsky, who against skepticism, dared to try to create a new scripting engine to replace the aging SCUMM engine. He was given the Dr. Dobbs article by a colleague and things came together. After the technical success of Grim Fandango, it was applied to Escape from Monkey Island. A few years(?) later at GDC, there was a 2 hour session to discuss scripting in games. Near the end, after everybody was depressed with no viable solutions, Bret's colleague exclaimed, "Or you can do what Bret did" and he was dragged up on stage. Bret gave an impromptu spiel about what Lua was and how they used it at LucasArts. Everybody else frantically scribbled down notes and that was how the video game industry adopted Lua as the dominant game scripting language. *Source: Bret Mogilefsky's talk at the very first Lua Workshop in 2005
- haberman 11y ago
  Lua is a simple and only slightly quirky (1-based arrays) dynamic programming language. It has exceptionally small and high quality implementations in Lua and LuaJIT. It has very good documentation. Its main downside is that the language changes in backward-compatible ways between releases. And worse, LuaJIT has in some sense forked the language. Lua 5.3 introduced integer support, but there are no plans to add this to LuaJIT AFAIK.
gravypod 11y ago
The C interface looks really well made. I might try and play around with this to make a few microservices.
vbit 11y ago
Linux only - bummer. Not even FreeBSD. The turbolua.org project is somewhat similar (i.e. a webserver with Lua support).
- geocar 11y ago
  Replacing the epoll() with kevent() looks pretty straightforward if you want to try it out, but FreeBSD should be able to do other tricks as well (e.g. http filters)
- acidx 11y ago
  It builds on FreeBSD (soon OS X), but it's not working yet.
- mhd 11y ago
  Which is why most "competitors" go for libevent (or libuv), as that abstracts over all the various select(3) improvements.
- luastoned 11y ago
  Turbo does not just support Lua, it's actually written with it.
foota 11y ago
I think the easy c interop is kind of neat.
mingodad 11y ago
With a small code base there is also h2o and it already has http2 and a very good https performance (can serve around twice as much than nginx). After looking for most of available http servers h2o is my preferred one right now. Also I have a fork of h2o compiled as C++ (right now it cleans a bit redundancy/verbosity of C) and add SquiLu and Lua scripting (h2o comes with mruby only). https://github.com/h2o/h2o https://github.com/h2o/h2o https://github.com/mingodad/h2o https://github.com/mingodad/h2o https://github.com/mingodad/squilu https://github.com/mingodad/squilu
- KenanSulayman 11y ago
  ... however, my h2o servers get a lower score with Qualys SSL Labs in their default configuration than Nginx does. This is due to the fact that h2o seems to support ciphers per default that are considered less secure (according to Qualys SSL Labs while testing servers using h2o).
  - mingodad 11y ago
    Interesting point, so it's using a dirty trick to show it as more performant ?
    - rurban 11y ago
      Nope. More insecure Ciphers are marginally slower than modern ones.
  - mingodad 11y ago
    I've looked at h2o website and seems that someone asked this question and there is an example of a stronger configuration. Using it I did a test on a raspberry pi 3 and here https://gist.github.com/mingodad/e5a46c809ee030befc18 https://gist.github.com/mingodad/e5a46c809ee030befc18 is the output. What I noticed is that with nginx there is more connections even using keepalive (h2o 4 connections, nginx 102 connections). h2o-default: 4123 rps h2o-strong-256-first: 3849 rps h2o-strong-384: 4233 rps nginx-default: 2309 rps
nvus 11y ago
Is Lwan a good project for a C beginner to learn more about C and contribute?
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  It has been made with great deal of attention to details and code quality, so yes, it is a good one.
jedisct1 11y ago
"Does it support HTTP2? -> Not yet" Ok, back to Nginx/H2O/Caddy.
xyproto 11y ago
Algernon supports both Lua and HTTP/2. Written in Go. http://algernon.roboticoverlords.org/ http://algernon.roboticoverlords.org/
ruffrey 11y ago
Interesting. Someone used lwan as a replacement for the Node.js HTTP server https://github.com/raadad/node-lwan https://github.com/raadad/node-lwan
mtw 11y ago
Interestingly, Lwan is the fastest server for json serialization : https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=json https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=... This could be a great choice as a json server, if they showed more examples working with data stores (postgres or cloud data stores) and also testing
tmaly 11y ago
I started out using Apache and now I am on Nginx. I like the simplicity of the configuration of Nginx along with the great documentation and modules. It would be a hard sell for me to switch to Lwan. My sites are not getting 300k connections all at once.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Finally a nice, open-source answer to Barracuda: http://barracudaserver.com/ http://barracudaserver.com/ Or closer to one, anyway. Support for RTOS's like QNX and INTEGRITY puts it ahead in a big way. Someone might port this to GenodeOS, MINIX 3, or something similar. Nonetheless, it's a start that might save someone some money. If it's well-done internally, it might also be easy to port to other languages or secure CPU's in development. That rids us of need for garbage collection or JIT.

99 points by mattbostock 11y ago

It seems like a cool project with a nice clean coding style, but the lack of API documentation makes it less inviting. I'm sitting here grepping through the repo without much of an idea of what to try next besides reading the whole code base.

ArnoldP 11y ago

I'm certainly not in the market for a webserver with lua support, but if I were I would definitely be looking at nginx first. May I suggest that you make a subsection/table that delineates why someone would go for this rather than nginx? There is a section that says that if you think of apache/nginx first then that {nginx/apache} is probably best for you, but I think lumping in apache and nginx together may be a mistake, and even if I'm giving preferential treatment to nginx I may be swayed nonetheless.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
poelzi 11y ago
I think it targets embedded machines which is actually quite nice in c + lua. openwrt uses this combo.

GaiusCoffee 11y ago

Lwan, a backronym for "Lwan Will Annihilate Node.js". Cheeky.

jacobush 11y ago
Technically, I think that's a recursive acronym. Backcronym is when something has a name and you after the fact make it into an acronym.
- draven 11y ago
  According to the FAQ it was suggested a posteriori, so technically it's a recursive backronym!

robbles 11y ago

> Hand-written HTTP request parser Aren't they all hand-written?

gmmeyer 11y ago
Yea, I'm not sure why that's a benefit, either. It's like they're trying to sell stuffed animals on Etsy, "hand sewed."
- acidx 11y ago
  That's not the only joke in the feature list (or the whole page, to be honest.)
wmf 11y ago
A few years ago Ragel was all the rage: http://zedshaw.com/archive/ragel-state-charts/ http://zedshaw.com/archive/ragel-state-charts/
grayrest 11y ago
More or less. There was a minor parser combinator arms race in the Rust community a few months ago using http parsing as the benchmark and my takeaway (only half paid attention, I haven't needed to write a parser) was that they got to roughly as fast as handwritten C parsers. Example: https://github.com/Geal/nom_benchmarks/tree/master/http https://github.com/Geal/nom_benchmarks/tree/master/http This hasn't translated into actual use in the Rust HTTP libs with hyper and rotor-http using their own handwritten parsers but I still think it might.

cordite 11y ago

Is the name a take on that phony gwan server? (It seemed fast, but it absolutely did not respect unique sessions when I bench'd it.)

acidx 11y ago
Kind of. I've tried making the page just as phony, but that's more difficult than it sounds.

ludamad 11y ago

The C API can be used from Lua with LuaJIT, right? It seems like this is the way to go to create the bindings.

acidx 11y ago
It's possible with FFI, yes, but it's not the way it's currently done in Lwan.

rdtsc 11y ago

Ha, I remember when we picked nginx because it was small, fast and simple years ago (compared to Apache). It is interesting how the cycle repeats. This is the new fast and simple, kind of what nginx started with.

VeejayRampay 11y ago
Doesn't really work with nginx though, a webserver that it still extremely fast and simple.

diskcat 11y ago

Is Lua the new in vogue programming language?

otabdeveloper 11y ago
Lua has been the standard extension language in gamedev and adtech for years and years.
wmt 11y ago
It was in the 90s, especially after the Dr Dobbs article about it, and tons of late 90s and early 2000s games, like Grim Fandango, Baldurs Gate and Escape from Monkey Island used Lua due to its hotness.
- ewmailing 11y ago
  Actually, Grim Fandango was the very first known game to use Lua and wasn't due to any hotness. Bret Mogilefsky, who against skepticism, dared to try to create a new scripting engine to replace the aging SCUMM engine. He was given the Dr. Dobbs article by a colleague and things came together. After the technical success of Grim Fandango, it was applied to Escape from Monkey Island. A few years(?) later at GDC, there was a 2 hour session to discuss scripting in games. Near the end, after everybody was depressed with no viable solutions, Bret's colleague exclaimed, "Or you can do what Bret did" and he was dragged up on stage. Bret gave an impromptu spiel about what Lua was and how they used it at LucasArts. Everybody else frantically scribbled down notes and that was how the video game industry adopted Lua as the dominant game scripting language. *Source: Bret Mogilefsky's talk at the very first Lua Workshop in 2005
haberman 11y ago
Lua is a simple and only slightly quirky (1-based arrays) dynamic programming language. It has exceptionally small and high quality implementations in Lua and LuaJIT. It has very good documentation. Its main downside is that the language changes in backward-compatible ways between releases. And worse, LuaJIT has in some sense forked the language. Lua 5.3 introduced integer support, but there are no plans to add this to LuaJIT AFAIK.

gravypod 11y ago

The C interface looks really well made. I might try and play around with this to make a few microservices.

vbit 11y ago

Linux only - bummer. Not even FreeBSD. The turbolua.org project is somewhat similar (i.e. a webserver with Lua support).

geocar 11y ago
Replacing the epoll() with kevent() looks pretty straightforward if you want to try it out, but FreeBSD should be able to do other tricks as well (e.g. http filters)
acidx 11y ago
It builds on FreeBSD (soon OS X), but it's not working yet.
mhd 11y ago
Which is why most "competitors" go for libevent (or libuv), as that abstracts over all the various select(3) improvements.
luastoned 11y ago
Turbo does not just support Lua, it's actually written with it.

foota 11y ago

I think the easy c interop is kind of neat.

mingodad 11y ago

With a small code base there is also h2o and it already has http2 and a very good https performance (can serve around twice as much than nginx). After looking for most of available http servers h2o is my preferred one right now. Also I have a fork of h2o compiled as C++ (right now it cleans a bit redundancy/verbosity of C) and add SquiLu and Lua scripting (h2o comes with mruby only). https://github.com/h2o/h2o https://github.com/h2o/h2o https://github.com/mingodad/h2o https://github.com/mingodad/h2o https://github.com/mingodad/squilu https://github.com/mingodad/squilu

KenanSulayman 11y ago
... however, my h2o servers get a lower score with Qualys SSL Labs in their default configuration than Nginx does. This is due to the fact that h2o seems to support ciphers per default that are considered less secure (according to Qualys SSL Labs while testing servers using h2o).
- mingodad 11y ago
  Interesting point, so it's using a dirty trick to show it as more performant ?
  - rurban 11y ago
    Nope. More insecure Ciphers are marginally slower than modern ones.
- mingodad 11y ago
  I've looked at h2o website and seems that someone asked this question and there is an example of a stronger configuration. Using it I did a test on a raspberry pi 3 and here https://gist.github.com/mingodad/e5a46c809ee030befc18 https://gist.github.com/mingodad/e5a46c809ee030befc18 is the output. What I noticed is that with nginx there is more connections even using keepalive (h2o 4 connections, nginx 102 connections). h2o-default: 4123 rps h2o-strong-256-first: 3849 rps h2o-strong-384: 4233 rps nginx-default: 2309 rps

nvus 11y ago

Is Lwan a good project for a C beginner to learn more about C and contribute?

dschiptsov 11y ago
It has been made with great deal of attention to details and code quality, so yes, it is a good one.

jedisct1 11y ago

"Does it support HTTP2? -> Not yet" Ok, back to Nginx/H2O/Caddy.

xyproto 11y ago

Algernon supports both Lua and HTTP/2. Written in Go. http://algernon.roboticoverlords.org/ http://algernon.roboticoverlords.org/

ruffrey 11y ago

Interesting. Someone used lwan as a replacement for the Node.js HTTP server https://github.com/raadad/node-lwan https://github.com/raadad/node-lwan

mtw 11y ago

Interestingly, Lwan is the fastest server for json serialization : https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=json https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=... This could be a great choice as a json server, if they showed more examples working with data stores (postgres or cloud data stores) and also testing

tmaly 11y ago

I started out using Apache and now I am on Nginx. I like the simplicity of the configuration of Nginx along with the great documentation and modules. It would be a hard sell for me to switch to Lwan. My sites are not getting 300k connections all at once.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Finally a nice, open-source answer to Barracuda: http://barracudaserver.com/ http://barracudaserver.com/ Or closer to one, anyway. Support for RTOS's like QNX and INTEGRITY puts it ahead in a big way. Someone might port this to GenodeOS, MINIX 3, or something similar. Nonetheless, it's a start that might save someone some money. If it's well-done internally, it might also be easy to port to other languages or secure CPU's in development. That rids us of need for garbage collection or JIT.