My toy web server can achieve similar performance using a much more modest hardware (Core i7 2640 laptop), using way less RAM (a few dozen kilobytes). Granted

My toy web server can achieve similar performance using a much more modest hardware (Core i7 2640 laptop), using way less RAM (a few dozen kilobytes). Granted this is also being tested on localhost with static content (no disk I/O) -- but shows that event-driven servers are not that novel or difficult to write: my code weighs around 1700 LOC of (might I say) readable C. Static file serving is also fast (using sendfile(), etc), but needs an overhaul to achieve usable concurrency. Currently there's a ~4x performance drop while serving files, but I'm working on this. (The sources are at http://github.com/lpereira/lwan http://github.com/lpereira/lwan by the way.)