Consider a look at Tcl. Tcl's socket support makes creating a webserver almost trivial: http://wiki.tcl.tk/11017 http://wiki.tcl.tk/11017 http://wiki.tcl.tk/

Consider a look at Tcl. Tcl's socket support makes creating a webserver almost trivial: http://wiki.tcl.tk/11017 http://wiki.tcl.tk/11017 http://wiki.tcl.tk/3899 http://wiki.tcl.tk/3899 http://pietersz.co.uk/software/dandelion-server http://pietersz.co.uk/software/dandelion-server http://wiki.tcl.tk/4333 http://wiki.tcl.tk/4333 http://wiki.tcl.tk/14413 http://wiki.tcl.tk/14413 http://wiki.tcl.tk/28412 http://wiki.tcl.tk/28412 http://wiki.tcl.tk/15244 http://wiki.tcl.tk/15244 That last one (15244) has a stated measurement of request rates of 1162 and 1127 per second (scroll down the page a bit). The advantage you'd have with Tcl is that since it abstracts away so much of the low level details of sockets and handling connections, you get to concentrate on (and learn) the http protocol instead of the low level socket handling details. As an example, here is the webserver from '28412 above, titled: "The Smallest Tcl Web Server" proc webServer {chan addr port} { while {[gets $chan] ne ""} {} puts $chan "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\nConnection: close\nContent-Type: text/plain\n" puts $chan "Hello World!" close $chan } socket -server webServer 2068 vwait forever