11 ms·

G-WAN - Web Application Server

69 points by hendler 14y ago

gringomorcego 14y ago
I'm sincerley interested in the ycombinator response. I found out about this after searching for nginx/apache alternaitives, and it seems to domeinate everything except the ram usage of nginx.
- ers35 14y ago
  If you are referring to the memory usage comparison at [1], the latest G-WAN version now uses less RAM than nginx. [1]http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static-files-which-server-to-use/ http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static...
  - mp3geek 14y ago
    And only tested with old versions of nginx.
    - ers35 14y ago
      Tests [1] and [2] both used the latest version of nginx at the time. [1]http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static-files-which-server-to-use/ http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static... [2]http://gwan.ch/benchmark http://gwan.ch/benchmark
- chubot 14y ago
  Did you try it? What happened?
ineedtosleep 14y ago
Can't comment about the technology, but the site has this extremely SEO-ified feel to it and makes the entire site less readable to me.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  It's not just the site. Even the PDF manual is in this style. "And this test is merely a single-thread test. Add concurrency and SQLite as well as Tokyo Cabinet die in pain because a single write blocks other read/write threads. Not in G-WAN's case. It is never ever blocking nor delaying any processing. How solid is it? G-WAN relies on it and has been tested with low and high concurrencies." I don't want all my comments here to be slamming this project, I just do not understand this maintainers mind.
  - X4 14y ago
    >How solid is it? G-WAN relies on it and has been tested with low and high concurrencies." I've compared it and can back that up and I think that TC learned a lot with Kyoto Cabinet as you can read on their page. Did you even compare SQLite and TC vs G-WAN KV yourself before posting this?
    - cdcarter 14y ago
      I was merely showing an example of the writing style found throughout.
      - X4 14y ago
        Do you really judge software by the writing style of the author on the homepage?
        echaozh 14y ago
        I think it is very reasonable, if the author also writes the documentation, which is the only way to get to know about the software.
ers35 14y ago
I have been using G-WAN for about a year. If anyone has specific questions regarding it, I will try to answer them.
- jmitcheson 14y ago
  Generally speaking, are the performance claims legitimate?
  - ers35 14y ago
    The author of G-WAN provides a benchmarking script[1] you can use to test the claims for yourself. [1]http://gwan.ch/benchmark http://gwan.ch/benchmark I have tested the claims and find them to be legitimate. If you have a more specific question, I may be able to provide more details.
- josephcooney 14y ago
  Why did you choose it over more conventional fare?
  - ers35 14y ago
    Here are a few reasons: * A small, yet useful set of core APIs (http://gwan.ch/api) * Applications are recompiled on the fly when a change is made * A "no compromises" attitude to performance and software design * It supports legacy applications written in CGI-style without the cost of CGI See this article for an interview with the author of the project[1] [1]http://salem-news.com/print/19923 http://salem-news.com/print/19923
- cdcarter 14y ago
  As I'm trying to wade through the manual currently... how does the apparently built in (and perhaps un-configurable?) JS/CSS and auto-spriting/data-uriing work?
  - ers35 14y ago
    Those features activate automatically in daemon mode. The manual explains it on page 7. Can you be more specific with your question? Perhaps these forum threads will help.[1][2] [1]http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/393/how-to-disabled-automatic-minifiying-javascript-anf-css/p1 http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/393/how-to-dis... [2]http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/5812/ http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/5812/
cdcarter 14y ago
I feel the same I felt when I first tried nginx so many years ago. And this time, there's English language documentation.
- merlincorey 14y ago
  NginX has had English language documentation on nginx.net and wiki.nginx.org for years and years.
  - cdcarter 14y ago
    I recall finding good (which I understand is a loaded qualifier) English docs was very difficult when I was first pointed in its direction.
    - merlincorey 14y ago
      Well, I have been using it since 0.6.x and helping out on freenode IRC and it has been tolerable to good English at least since then. When Igor posted the introduction documents[1] he even had them previewed on the mailing list so that the English could be corrected before posting. [1] http://nginx.org/en/docs/introduction.html http://nginx.org/en/docs/introduction.html
Osiris 14y ago
I tried out GWAN on a VPS a while back. There's no configuration file, you setup directories named in certain ways to tell the webserver what IP/port to bind to. I cannot comment on how much fast it is because it's been years since I ran benchmarks against it. Even supposing the claims are true, currently it's very limited in what languages it supports. It's great at static content, but dynamic content must be written in C or use a C library. In other words, PHP, Python, and Ruby support are pretty much non-existent (though someone has tried to get PHP FastCGI to work with it). The author is also fairly arrogant. Earlier versions of the website claimed his code was "perfect" and that he wrote it because no else seemed competent enough to do it right (I'm trying to find the quote). Regarding PHP: > And without something like G-WAN you can forget about PHP in the years to come because it will not survive the parallelism's requirements.
- ers35 14y ago
  > Even supposing the claims are true, currently it's very limited in what languages it supports. It's great at static content, but dynamic content must be written in C or use a C library. That is no longer accurate. G-WAN now supports C, Java, C++, D, and Objective C out of the box. [1] I am the someone who is implementing FastCGI support. [1]http://gwan.ch/developers http://gwan.ch/developers
  - eropple 14y ago
    I'm not trying to be disrespectful because I'm sure you've put in a lot of work on your part of the project, but little to nothing on that page makes any sort of sense. Where is this terrifying efficiency hit from "the frenetic wave of abstraction layers" that the author of that page is claiming? Does the author even realize that he sounds like a huckster and his claims about other projects have only a tenuous relationship to reality? And why would I trust the judgment of developers who think that writing web applications in C is a perfectly cromulent idea? Second reaction: am I actually supposed to take seriously something that looks like that Java sample? 'Cause, er, I know a teeeeeensy bit about Java, and my first reaction was "what kind of moron would write Java like that?". Java isn't C, and this guy's bizarre worship of "programming to the metal" (it's a web architecture for god's sake!) makes no sense there.
eropple 14y ago
I get bad vibes whenever I see server software that isn't permissively licensed at least far enough that I can see the code. So I go look at their FAQ to see what they say about getting source access: http://gwan.ch/faq#license http://gwan.ch/faq#license WTF? I mean, in what universe would I trust this sort of handwaving? Lumping people who might want to actually, y'know, audit the software they're running in with "oh my god they wants to steals my codes!"...I think I'll pass and encourage those I know to do likewise. (Plus, as cdcarter notes elsewhere in this thread, his reasoning for no OS X binary is incoherent at best, and reading posts by the author makes me wonder exactly what chain of jerkstores he's supplying with his attitude.)
- derleth 14y ago
  From the site (which seems to disallow copy-paste): > The next time someone feels the need to publicly call G-WAN's (1-page) license "weird" or "insane", look at what they sell and who they get their revenues from. Unlike for G-WAN, what they offer is not free for all. They have redefined the word 'free' into a fine mist if they expect you to believe Apache and nginx are not free. They're doing something I've seen done before; oddly, it was mainly being done by Usenet trolls.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    >They're doing something I've seen done before; oddly, it was mainly being done by Usenet trolls. Every time I read something off that webpage my mental voice uses my Japanese "Engrish" accent to read it. So I can't say that I was really surprised when I saw that. (I'm actually getting the vibe that the lead developer may have lost a few of his marbles.) At the same time it totally took a shotgun to the guys credibility when he implied that projects like nginx aren't free but G-WAN is.
    - cdcarter 14y ago
      Just wait to you get to the part where he suggests that instead of rewriting URIs you should just use the servers cache function to cache to a static page with a very low expiry.
cdcarter 14y ago
Here's a very interesting thread in the forums of the project maintainer refusing (or perhaps denying his ability) to provide an OS X binary: http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/420/g-wan-on-mac-os-x-lion-server/#Item_13 http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/420/g-wan-on-m.... Perhaps this is a third point on the "why would you need it to be open sourced" continuum.
- wtracy 14y ago
  "If you want to help me deliver a Mac version of G-WAN, tell me how to install a C compiler on Mac OS X." Sounds like there's some real bright ones on this development team.
  - 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
    Pierre was a Windows-only developer for 20-something years. It may not sound bright by taking that quote out of its context, but the thread itself is longer that that. You know that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".
readme 14y ago
>Since its first release in 2009, G-WAN is the undisputed technical leader of a well-financed (20 years old) market. How come I am only hearing about it now?
plantain 14y ago
I think they made a good choice to remove all the pages on their site accusing Microsoft of a jihad against them, the site is much more respectable now. You can still find the author accusing Microsoft of a Jihad against them on archive.org [1] or on their forums [2] Their stance on open source rubs me the wrong way too... http://gwan.ch/faq#license http://gwan.ch/faq#license [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20101023050912/http://gwan.ch/en_jihad.html http://web.archive.org/web/20101023050912/http://gwan.ch/en_... [2] http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/3165/#Comment_3165 http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/3165/#...
madrona 14y ago
This is hilarious.
mafro 14y ago
"These examples illustrate how C scripts seriously fit the task of rapid (and efficient) Web development – especially when used from a Web framework designed to make things as simple as they should be" LOL
SeoxyS 14y ago
This website tells me a lot about how it's "better" than the alternatives, but tells me nothing about what this even is. I've looked at it for a while, and I still can't figure it out. It mentions web servers, communication libraries, code parallelization, persistence layer... So what is it?
- ers35 14y ago
  The manual explains it: http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf
  - sausagefeet 14y ago
    I like how it claims to be provably safer than other webservers but the two claims require reading the code.
    - X4 14y ago
      I love opensource, but I really can't understand people whining about one guys closed-source program when most software+hardware around him is closed-source also. That's so blind hatted.
      - sausagefeet 14y ago
        What? Almost the entire stack in every place I have worked, except a bank, has been open source software. And I don't think people are upset that it's not open source, they find it a joke that the author makes all these ridiculous claims and is closed source.
rawoke 14y ago
I was a huge fan+user until the author closed down he's forum on he's site for no other reason(that I can deduce) he didn't like the feedback|comments about the project. Pity I think those forums brought in a lot of "feet/traffic" to the project !
Animus7 14y ago
The "Support" page reveals how they charge $200,000/year for the privilege of setting a header: > 199,999 [Swiss francs]: Use G-WAN under the brand of your choice (custom "Server: x" HTTP header). This isn't the most insane upsell I've heard of, but it's close.
- X4 14y ago
  not really, it's selling technical support.
  - cdcarter 14y ago
    No, the support plan is different, this is actually an additional 200,000 swiss francs for that branding.
- tantalor 14y ago
  You have to give them credit for coming up with the idea of selling HTTP headers.
riffic 14y ago
Oh, how sometimes I love Wikipedians' determination of what is notable or not - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/G-WAN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
- paulhodge 14y ago
  Ha, that is a fun read. My favorite part, where one guy points out that the Google search for "g-wan web server" has 2,440,000 results. The reply: Google search results for: "a-wan web server": About 8,030,000 results (0.29 seconds) "b-wan web server": About 5,600,000 results (0.21 seconds) "c-wan web server": About 4,010,000 results (0.28 seconds) "d-wan web server": About 3,410,000 results (0.29 seconds) "e-wan web server": About 2,770,000 results (0.25 seconds) "f-wan web server": About 2,430,000 results (0.27 seconds)
tjholowaychuk 14y ago
fail
- bakkdoor 14y ago
  this is insane.
slyphon 14y ago
My bullshit detector is going off so loudly, I think I best go lie down. At my last company, we paid for a Zeus ZXTM license (which was an excellent product and very expensive for our little startup), and they didn't approach the level of arrogance here. The varnish guy is kind of opinionated, but he's got the chops to back it up, and you can, y'know, look at the source. An obvious benefit of open source is also that if I take a large risk of running my business on your oddball web server and you get hit by a bus, I'm pretty much hosed. I'd rather buy 4 additional servers and run nginx than take that risk. Or, y'know, use a CDN. Whatever, if the developers really are THAT much more skilled and their product is so far and away better than every other solution out there, then they should really hire someone who knows how to do marketing and PR properly, because they're not doing themselves any favors.
- reinhardt 14y ago
  Off-topic, but I'm curious why you paid for Zeus instead of any other battle-tested FOSS alternative.
  - slyphon 14y ago
    We needed load balancers and at the time, the choices were ZXTM, ServerIron (which I'd used subsequently, and am very grateful we didn't pick) or F5. We'd had a truly terrible experience with an F5 reseller so we decided to meet with the Zeus guys. One really attractive option at the time was that they would provide us a solaris build of their software (we were a Solaris 10 shop), and we could run it on our own hardware, which was much better provisioned than the comparable F5 hardware at the time. All of that aside, the motivation was that by using a product, instead of rolling our own solution, would be more maintainable, and we'd have a support contract. Compared with the mod_rewrite mess we had, ZXTM was a huge improvement. Plus we got stats, graphs, IP failover that worked flawlessly, active/active configuration sync, and a webui that made it so people who weren't intimately familiar with the config syntax of a variety of disparate services could perform fairly complex tasks (like A-B builds). I mean, we also paid for Cisco ASA 5550s as a firewall/VPN solution for many of the same reasons. It all came down to what we wanted to spend our time engineering and what we could get management to spend money on. :)
chadnickbok 14y ago
Sounds great, except web servers aren't something people pay for anymore. Nobody wants to 'steal code', its that code for a WebServer isn't something worth stealing. As for being amazingly fast? I can write an AMAZINGLY fast server capable of serving up 'Hello, World!' at speeds that can blow everything else outta the water; of course this is of no use to anyone anywhere.
- ers35 14y ago
  You do not have to pay any money to run G-WAN.[1] G-WAN is not merely a "hello world" server. See [2] for the API features and [3] for more details. [1]http://gwan.ch/download http://gwan.ch/download [2]http://gwan.ch/api http://gwan.ch/api [3]http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf
bakkdoor 14y ago
Gotta love their "insurance": http://gwan.ch/insurance http://gwan.ch/insurance o_O
- bakkdoor 14y ago
  "In the case of an acquisition of G-WAN's Copyrights, the new owner would be the best promotional player of parallelized architectures, and therefore a desirable partner for Intel, AMD, ARM, IBM and Oracle. This fact alone should sustain the disponibility of the product – whether TrustLeap or someone else maintains it" .. right.
- shellox 14y ago
  "Source Code Insurance" I hope you don't have to pay monthly..
  - cdcarter 14y ago
    Per the fine print, it's yearly.
readme 14y ago
Yet another red flag I just noticed in the instructions here: http://gwan.ch/download http://gwan.ch/download sudo ./gwan Now go to localhost:8080 to try the demos! But wait, I don't need root to open port 8080. So why sudo? Maybe some weird install procedure runs.... No thanks.
- slackartillery 14y ago
  It is claimed in the documentation that the way to optimise G-WAN for speed is to run it as root, it can be run as a user, but then its slow as molasses or something. It's also claimed that this is the only optimisation required or available for speed.
- ers35 14y ago
  G-WAN does not require any installation and you do not need to run it as root. If you run G-WAN as root, it will automatically apply certain optimizations such as giving itself access to more than 1024 sockets. Remove sudo and the examples still work.
  - eropple 14y ago
    > If you run G-WAN as root, it will automatically apply certain optimizations such as giving itself access to more than 1024 sockets. That this is termed "an optimization" terrifies the shit out of me. Even moreso than the whole "hey, run it as root, broseph!" part. I am unsure why you are carrying this dude's water, but nothing I have seen makes anything related to this project seem either sane or production-safe. There is crazy in these hills, my friend. Undiluted.
    - ers35 14y ago
      > That this is termed "an optimization" terrifies the shit out of me. What word do you suggest I use to describe configuring a program to have access to more sockets? > Even moreso than the whole "hey, run it as root, broseph!" part. In daemon mode, G-WAN drops privileges to the user and group of your choosing.
lukeschlather 14y ago
Is this a long troll? I'm amazed that a server billed as performant and designed for "real programmers" needs to put gems like this on their product pages: > You have to change the PATH variable if you want to call programs without specifying their location.
- readme 14y ago
  I am with you on this. I think it's a very elaborate ruse. If it isn't, then they have totally failed at marketing and should try to fix that.
shellox 14y ago
I would never use this for a production system to be honest. I don't see the benefits of G-WAN over nginx. Nginx is open source, so you can read the source and modify it, which gives you much more control over the server, because you know how the internals work. The nginx community is also really great, so you can find solutions for problems really fast.
Ygg2 14y ago
I don't get it. If G-Wan is so much better (performance wise), what's holding it back? I mean other than the licensing and the attitude of its programmer.
- ers35 14y ago
  Here are some reasons: * G-WAN is not open-source, so people (justifiably) resist trying it. * It lacks software that takes advantage of the platform. * G-WAN gets limited coverage on news sites. (it's banned from Wikipedia for example) * People react negatively to the extraordinary claims made by its author without verifying them with the provided benchmark tool
  - Ygg2 14y ago
    Well some of the claims do appear a bit far fetched and the terms used are really confusing (my bet is that the programmer is non-native speaker). And it's not banned from Wikipedia, it's just deemed not relevant. But that can't be all, can it?
    - 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
      Other lightweight web servers which fall into the same category as G-WAN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiawatha_(web_server) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiawatha_(web_server) are still on Wikipedia. No news about any "reliable" references. However, it was not marked for speedy deletion. Don't get me wrong, Hiawatha is a lovely web server. But people on Wikipedia don't use the same measurement for all products.
    - ers35 14y ago
      If you list the claims you feel are far fetched, I can try to provide evidence to support them.
      - Ygg2 14y ago
        Perhaps far fetched is not the best word to use. The tone of some messages (world's fastest server/web_proxy) is off putting but what really irks me is the totally weird ones: Like units sold for Apple/Mircosoft/Google... What does that prove? Google doesn't sell anything tangible (maybe they sold some Google android phones but that was a one time event).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
staunch 14y ago
For static content the massive leap was from multithreaded/fork()ing servers to event-based servers (like nginx) powered by epoll (and similar). Event based servers let you handle thousands of slow clients extremely easily. That's basically all you need to get the kind of performance 99.9% of people will ever need for static content. Nginx more than does this job. For dynamic content multi-process servers are still just fine because your code/DB requests are going to block for long periods, which is far easier than writing non-blocking code. Putting an event-based server in front of a multi-process server for dynamic stuff gets you the best of both worlds. Something like G-WAN might have a niche for the few people that need to write some piece of their service in C for performance reasons. But, you can pretty easily do that as an nginx module as well, and it's simply not necessary except in very rare cases. It seems neat, but I don't think it's of much use to most people.
bullcrab 14y ago
this is crap. node.js rocks. and node.js starting with v6 can do parallel cpu as well. go node.js. go heroku cedar.
- helper-method 14y ago
  What's V6?
daemon13 14y ago
I wonder what are the benefits of setting G-WAN versus 2-3 nginx with 10-15 gunicorns behind it? In the latter case you have proven software that is easy to set-up and scale. If need more, then : - add more nginx/more gunicorns - add haproxy - add DNS balancing So, what's the point?
- ers35 14y ago
  Adding more servers costs money. Doing more with less saves money. See page 2 of http://gwan.ch/archives/g-wan_case.pdf http://gwan.ch/archives/g-wan_case.pdf.
  - daemon13 14y ago
    Well, in my specific case, I am OK with money - 10 VPS ~ $200-600 per month. You spend more on a couple of trips to supermarket. I don't have time and 15 years of programming under my belt.
MetaCosm 14y ago
I played around with this project a couple years ago, so I can give some feedback on my experience. It isn't a con or joke and it isn't full of lies... that said, I still couldn't use it. First of all, it is mostly one guy, and he seems exceptionally bright, and a bit freaking insane (Tesla was crazy but still smart, so it can work). I exchanged a few emails with him that combined with lack of access to the source drove me away from the project. That said, every single claim he made I found to be either valid or an undersell on the actual performance (it did even better than he claimed in my tests). I was rather blown away by the performance, but the risk profile on it just made it unacceptable. Code C-Script (it supports more now, I am aware, but at that point it was C), no source, [possibly] nutjob one man show, no ability to easily hire people to work on it (which to be fair is entirely chicken and egg). But, it is still a project I watch with mild interest... and I do encourage people to try it (great comment on this thread how to run it as a user http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4110247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4110247) and try it out, if nothing else it is extremely opinionated software, and it really is borderline insanely fast.
riccardot 14y ago
I cannot access the forum. It seems he has blocked the forum. This really puts me off. I find C-scripts really cool and the performance are really fast. I do not think there is a better server to run C-based web sites

69 points by hendler 14y ago

I'm sincerley interested in the ycombinator response. I found out about this after searching for nginx/apache alternaitives, and it seems to domeinate everything except the ram usage of nginx.

ers35 14y ago
If you are referring to the memory usage comparison at [1], the latest G-WAN version now uses less RAM than nginx. [1]http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static-files-which-server-to-use/ http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static...
- mp3geek 14y ago
  And only tested with old versions of nginx.
  - ers35 14y ago
    Tests [1] and [2] both used the latest version of nginx at the time. [1]http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static-files-which-server-to-use/ http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/serving-small-static... [2]http://gwan.ch/benchmark http://gwan.ch/benchmark
chubot 14y ago
Did you try it? What happened?

ineedtosleep 14y ago

Can't comment about the technology, but the site has this extremely SEO-ified feel to it and makes the entire site less readable to me.

cdcarter 14y ago
It's not just the site. Even the PDF manual is in this style. "And this test is merely a single-thread test. Add concurrency and SQLite as well as Tokyo Cabinet die in pain because a single write blocks other read/write threads. Not in G-WAN's case. It is never ever blocking nor delaying any processing. How solid is it? G-WAN relies on it and has been tested with low and high concurrencies." I don't want all my comments here to be slamming this project, I just do not understand this maintainers mind.
- X4 14y ago
  >How solid is it? G-WAN relies on it and has been tested with low and high concurrencies." I've compared it and can back that up and I think that TC learned a lot with Kyoto Cabinet as you can read on their page. Did you even compare SQLite and TC vs G-WAN KV yourself before posting this?
  - cdcarter 14y ago
    I was merely showing an example of the writing style found throughout.
    - X4 14y ago
      Do you really judge software by the writing style of the author on the homepage?
      - echaozh 14y ago
        I think it is very reasonable, if the author also writes the documentation, which is the only way to get to know about the software.

ers35 14y ago

I have been using G-WAN for about a year. If anyone has specific questions regarding it, I will try to answer them.

jmitcheson 14y ago
Generally speaking, are the performance claims legitimate?
- ers35 14y ago
  The author of G-WAN provides a benchmarking script[1] you can use to test the claims for yourself. [1]http://gwan.ch/benchmark http://gwan.ch/benchmark I have tested the claims and find them to be legitimate. If you have a more specific question, I may be able to provide more details.
josephcooney 14y ago
Why did you choose it over more conventional fare?
- ers35 14y ago
  Here are a few reasons: * A small, yet useful set of core APIs (http://gwan.ch/api) * Applications are recompiled on the fly when a change is made * A "no compromises" attitude to performance and software design * It supports legacy applications written in CGI-style without the cost of CGI See this article for an interview with the author of the project[1] [1]http://salem-news.com/print/19923 http://salem-news.com/print/19923
cdcarter 14y ago
As I'm trying to wade through the manual currently... how does the apparently built in (and perhaps un-configurable?) JS/CSS and auto-spriting/data-uriing work?
- ers35 14y ago
  Those features activate automatically in daemon mode. The manual explains it on page 7. Can you be more specific with your question? Perhaps these forum threads will help.[1][2] [1]http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/393/how-to-disabled-automatic-minifiying-javascript-anf-css/p1 http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/393/how-to-dis... [2]http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/5812/ http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/5812/

cdcarter 14y ago

I feel the same I felt when I first tried nginx so many years ago. And this time, there's English language documentation.

merlincorey 14y ago
NginX has had English language documentation on nginx.net and wiki.nginx.org for years and years.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  I recall finding good (which I understand is a loaded qualifier) English docs was very difficult when I was first pointed in its direction.
  - merlincorey 14y ago
    Well, I have been using it since 0.6.x and helping out on freenode IRC and it has been tolerable to good English at least since then. When Igor posted the introduction documents[1] he even had them previewed on the mailing list so that the English could be corrected before posting. [1] http://nginx.org/en/docs/introduction.html http://nginx.org/en/docs/introduction.html

Osiris 14y ago

I tried out GWAN on a VPS a while back. There's no configuration file, you setup directories named in certain ways to tell the webserver what IP/port to bind to. I cannot comment on how much fast it is because it's been years since I ran benchmarks against it. Even supposing the claims are true, currently it's very limited in what languages it supports. It's great at static content, but dynamic content must be written in C or use a C library. In other words, PHP, Python, and Ruby support are pretty much non-existent (though someone has tried to get PHP FastCGI to work with it). The author is also fairly arrogant. Earlier versions of the website claimed his code was "perfect" and that he wrote it because no else seemed competent enough to do it right (I'm trying to find the quote). Regarding PHP: > And without something like G-WAN you can forget about PHP in the years to come because it will not survive the parallelism's requirements.

ers35 14y ago
> Even supposing the claims are true, currently it's very limited in what languages it supports. It's great at static content, but dynamic content must be written in C or use a C library. That is no longer accurate. G-WAN now supports C, Java, C++, D, and Objective C out of the box. [1] I am the someone who is implementing FastCGI support. [1]http://gwan.ch/developers http://gwan.ch/developers
- eropple 14y ago
  I'm not trying to be disrespectful because I'm sure you've put in a lot of work on your part of the project, but little to nothing on that page makes any sort of sense. Where is this terrifying efficiency hit from "the frenetic wave of abstraction layers" that the author of that page is claiming? Does the author even realize that he sounds like a huckster and his claims about other projects have only a tenuous relationship to reality? And why would I trust the judgment of developers who think that writing web applications in C is a perfectly cromulent idea? Second reaction: am I actually supposed to take seriously something that looks like that Java sample? 'Cause, er, I know a teeeeeensy bit about Java, and my first reaction was "what kind of moron would write Java like that?". Java isn't C, and this guy's bizarre worship of "programming to the metal" (it's a web architecture for god's sake!) makes no sense there.

eropple 14y ago

I get bad vibes whenever I see server software that isn't permissively licensed at least far enough that I can see the code. So I go look at their FAQ to see what they say about getting source access: http://gwan.ch/faq#license http://gwan.ch/faq#license WTF? I mean, in what universe would I trust this sort of handwaving? Lumping people who might want to actually, y'know, audit the software they're running in with "oh my god they wants to steals my codes!"...I think I'll pass and encourage those I know to do likewise. (Plus, as cdcarter notes elsewhere in this thread, his reasoning for no OS X binary is incoherent at best, and reading posts by the author makes me wonder exactly what chain of jerkstores he's supplying with his attitude.)

derleth 14y ago
From the site (which seems to disallow copy-paste): > The next time someone feels the need to publicly call G-WAN's (1-page) license "weird" or "insane", look at what they sell and who they get their revenues from. Unlike for G-WAN, what they offer is not free for all. They have redefined the word 'free' into a fine mist if they expect you to believe Apache and nginx are not free. They're doing something I've seen done before; oddly, it was mainly being done by Usenet trolls.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  >They're doing something I've seen done before; oddly, it was mainly being done by Usenet trolls. Every time I read something off that webpage my mental voice uses my Japanese "Engrish" accent to read it. So I can't say that I was really surprised when I saw that. (I'm actually getting the vibe that the lead developer may have lost a few of his marbles.) At the same time it totally took a shotgun to the guys credibility when he implied that projects like nginx aren't free but G-WAN is.
  - cdcarter 14y ago
    Just wait to you get to the part where he suggests that instead of rewriting URIs you should just use the servers cache function to cache to a static page with a very low expiry.

cdcarter 14y ago

Here's a very interesting thread in the forums of the project maintainer refusing (or perhaps denying his ability) to provide an OS X binary: http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/420/g-wan-on-mac-os-x-lion-server/#Item_13 http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/420/g-wan-on-m.... Perhaps this is a third point on the "why would you need it to be open sourced" continuum.

wtracy 14y ago
"If you want to help me deliver a Mac version of G-WAN, tell me how to install a C compiler on Mac OS X." Sounds like there's some real bright ones on this development team.
- 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
  Pierre was a Windows-only developer for 20-something years. It may not sound bright by taking that quote out of its context, but the thread itself is longer that that. You know that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".

readme 14y ago

>Since its first release in 2009, G-WAN is the undisputed technical leader of a well-financed (20 years old) market. How come I am only hearing about it now?

plantain 14y ago

I think they made a good choice to remove all the pages on their site accusing Microsoft of a jihad against them, the site is much more respectable now. You can still find the author accusing Microsoft of a Jihad against them on archive.org [1] or on their forums [2] Their stance on open source rubs me the wrong way too... http://gwan.ch/faq#license http://gwan.ch/faq#license [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20101023050912/http://gwan.ch/en_jihad.html http://web.archive.org/web/20101023050912/http://gwan.ch/en_... [2] http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/3165/#Comment_3165 http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/3165/#...

madrona 14y ago

This is hilarious.

mafro 14y ago

"These examples illustrate how C scripts seriously fit the task of rapid (and efficient) Web development – especially when used from a Web framework designed to make things as simple as they should be" LOL

SeoxyS 14y ago

This website tells me a lot about how it's "better" than the alternatives, but tells me nothing about what this even is. I've looked at it for a while, and I still can't figure it out. It mentions web servers, communication libraries, code parallelization, persistence layer... So what is it?

ers35 14y ago
The manual explains it: http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf
- sausagefeet 14y ago
  I like how it claims to be provably safer than other webservers but the two claims require reading the code.
  - X4 14y ago
    I love opensource, but I really can't understand people whining about one guys closed-source program when most software+hardware around him is closed-source also. That's so blind hatted.
    - sausagefeet 14y ago
      What? Almost the entire stack in every place I have worked, except a bank, has been open source software. And I don't think people are upset that it's not open source, they find it a joke that the author makes all these ridiculous claims and is closed source.

rawoke 14y ago

I was a huge fan+user until the author closed down he's forum on he's site for no other reason(that I can deduce) he didn't like the feedback|comments about the project. Pity I think those forums brought in a lot of "feet/traffic" to the project !

Animus7 14y ago

The "Support" page reveals how they charge $200,000/year for the privilege of setting a header: > 199,999 [Swiss francs]: Use G-WAN under the brand of your choice (custom "Server: x" HTTP header). This isn't the most insane upsell I've heard of, but it's close.

X4 14y ago
not really, it's selling technical support.
- cdcarter 14y ago
  No, the support plan is different, this is actually an additional 200,000 swiss francs for that branding.
tantalor 14y ago
You have to give them credit for coming up with the idea of selling HTTP headers.

riffic 14y ago

Oh, how sometimes I love Wikipedians' determination of what is notable or not - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/G-WAN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

paulhodge 14y ago
Ha, that is a fun read. My favorite part, where one guy points out that the Google search for "g-wan web server" has 2,440,000 results. The reply: Google search results for: "a-wan web server": About 8,030,000 results (0.29 seconds) "b-wan web server": About 5,600,000 results (0.21 seconds) "c-wan web server": About 4,010,000 results (0.28 seconds) "d-wan web server": About 3,410,000 results (0.29 seconds) "e-wan web server": About 2,770,000 results (0.25 seconds) "f-wan web server": About 2,430,000 results (0.27 seconds)

tjholowaychuk 14y ago

fail

bakkdoor 14y ago
this is insane.

slyphon 14y ago

My bullshit detector is going off so loudly, I think I best go lie down. At my last company, we paid for a Zeus ZXTM license (which was an excellent product and very expensive for our little startup), and they didn't approach the level of arrogance here. The varnish guy is kind of opinionated, but he's got the chops to back it up, and you can, y'know, look at the source. An obvious benefit of open source is also that if I take a large risk of running my business on your oddball web server and you get hit by a bus, I'm pretty much hosed. I'd rather buy 4 additional servers and run nginx than take that risk. Or, y'know, use a CDN. Whatever, if the developers really are THAT much more skilled and their product is so far and away better than every other solution out there, then they should really hire someone who knows how to do marketing and PR properly, because they're not doing themselves any favors.

reinhardt 14y ago
Off-topic, but I'm curious why you paid for Zeus instead of any other battle-tested FOSS alternative.
- slyphon 14y ago
  We needed load balancers and at the time, the choices were ZXTM, ServerIron (which I'd used subsequently, and am very grateful we didn't pick) or F5. We'd had a truly terrible experience with an F5 reseller so we decided to meet with the Zeus guys. One really attractive option at the time was that they would provide us a solaris build of their software (we were a Solaris 10 shop), and we could run it on our own hardware, which was much better provisioned than the comparable F5 hardware at the time. All of that aside, the motivation was that by using a product, instead of rolling our own solution, would be more maintainable, and we'd have a support contract. Compared with the mod_rewrite mess we had, ZXTM was a huge improvement. Plus we got stats, graphs, IP failover that worked flawlessly, active/active configuration sync, and a webui that made it so people who weren't intimately familiar with the config syntax of a variety of disparate services could perform fairly complex tasks (like A-B builds). I mean, we also paid for Cisco ASA 5550s as a firewall/VPN solution for many of the same reasons. It all came down to what we wanted to spend our time engineering and what we could get management to spend money on. :)

chadnickbok 14y ago

Sounds great, except web servers aren't something people pay for anymore. Nobody wants to 'steal code', its that code for a WebServer isn't something worth stealing. As for being amazingly fast? I can write an AMAZINGLY fast server capable of serving up 'Hello, World!' at speeds that can blow everything else outta the water; of course this is of no use to anyone anywhere.

ers35 14y ago
You do not have to pay any money to run G-WAN.[1] G-WAN is not merely a "hello world" server. See [2] for the API features and [3] for more details. [1]http://gwan.ch/download http://gwan.ch/download [2]http://gwan.ch/api http://gwan.ch/api [3]http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf http://gwan.ch/archives/gwan_linux.pdf

bakkdoor 14y ago

Gotta love their "insurance": http://gwan.ch/insurance http://gwan.ch/insurance o_O

bakkdoor 14y ago
"In the case of an acquisition of G-WAN's Copyrights, the new owner would be the best promotional player of parallelized architectures, and therefore a desirable partner for Intel, AMD, ARM, IBM and Oracle. This fact alone should sustain the disponibility of the product – whether TrustLeap or someone else maintains it" .. right.
shellox 14y ago
"Source Code Insurance" I hope you don't have to pay monthly..
- cdcarter 14y ago
  Per the fine print, it's yearly.

readme 14y ago

Yet another red flag I just noticed in the instructions here: http://gwan.ch/download http://gwan.ch/download sudo ./gwan Now go to localhost:8080 to try the demos! But wait, I don't need root to open port 8080. So why sudo? Maybe some weird install procedure runs.... No thanks.

slackartillery 14y ago
It is claimed in the documentation that the way to optimise G-WAN for speed is to run it as root, it can be run as a user, but then its slow as molasses or something. It's also claimed that this is the only optimisation required or available for speed.
ers35 14y ago
G-WAN does not require any installation and you do not need to run it as root. If you run G-WAN as root, it will automatically apply certain optimizations such as giving itself access to more than 1024 sockets. Remove sudo and the examples still work.
- eropple 14y ago
  > If you run G-WAN as root, it will automatically apply certain optimizations such as giving itself access to more than 1024 sockets. That this is termed "an optimization" terrifies the shit out of me. Even moreso than the whole "hey, run it as root, broseph!" part. I am unsure why you are carrying this dude's water, but nothing I have seen makes anything related to this project seem either sane or production-safe. There is crazy in these hills, my friend. Undiluted.
  - ers35 14y ago
    > That this is termed "an optimization" terrifies the shit out of me. What word do you suggest I use to describe configuring a program to have access to more sockets? > Even moreso than the whole "hey, run it as root, broseph!" part. In daemon mode, G-WAN drops privileges to the user and group of your choosing.

lukeschlather 14y ago

Is this a long troll? I'm amazed that a server billed as performant and designed for "real programmers" needs to put gems like this on their product pages: > You have to change the PATH variable if you want to call programs without specifying their location.

readme 14y ago
I am with you on this. I think it's a very elaborate ruse. If it isn't, then they have totally failed at marketing and should try to fix that.

shellox 14y ago

I would never use this for a production system to be honest. I don't see the benefits of G-WAN over nginx. Nginx is open source, so you can read the source and modify it, which gives you much more control over the server, because you know how the internals work. The nginx community is also really great, so you can find solutions for problems really fast.

Ygg2 14y ago

I don't get it. If G-Wan is so much better (performance wise), what's holding it back? I mean other than the licensing and the attitude of its programmer.

ers35 14y ago
Here are some reasons: * G-WAN is not open-source, so people (justifiably) resist trying it. * It lacks software that takes advantage of the platform. * G-WAN gets limited coverage on news sites. (it's banned from Wikipedia for example) * People react negatively to the extraordinary claims made by its author without verifying them with the provided benchmark tool
- Ygg2 14y ago
  Well some of the claims do appear a bit far fetched and the terms used are really confusing (my bet is that the programmer is non-native speaker). And it's not banned from Wikipedia, it's just deemed not relevant. But that can't be all, can it?
  - 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
    Other lightweight web servers which fall into the same category as G-WAN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiawatha_(web_server) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiawatha_(web_server) are still on Wikipedia. No news about any "reliable" references. However, it was not marked for speedy deletion. Don't get me wrong, Hiawatha is a lovely web server. But people on Wikipedia don't use the same measurement for all products.
  - ers35 14y ago
    If you list the claims you feel are far fetched, I can try to provide evidence to support them.
    - Ygg2 14y ago
      Perhaps far fetched is not the best word to use. The tone of some messages (world's fastest server/web_proxy) is off putting but what really irks me is the totally weird ones: Like units sold for Apple/Mircosoft/Google... What does that prove? Google doesn't sell anything tangible (maybe they sold some Google android phones but that was a one time event).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

staunch 14y ago

For static content the massive leap was from multithreaded/fork()ing servers to event-based servers (like nginx) powered by epoll (and similar). Event based servers let you handle thousands of slow clients extremely easily. That's basically all you need to get the kind of performance 99.9% of people will ever need for static content. Nginx more than does this job. For dynamic content multi-process servers are still just fine because your code/DB requests are going to block for long periods, which is far easier than writing non-blocking code. Putting an event-based server in front of a multi-process server for dynamic stuff gets you the best of both worlds. Something like G-WAN might have a niche for the few people that need to write some piece of their service in C for performance reasons. But, you can pretty easily do that as an nginx module as well, and it's simply not necessary except in very rare cases. It seems neat, but I don't think it's of much use to most people.

bullcrab 14y ago

this is crap. node.js rocks. and node.js starting with v6 can do parallel cpu as well. go node.js. go heroku cedar.

helper-method 14y ago
What's V6?

daemon13 14y ago

I wonder what are the benefits of setting G-WAN versus 2-3 nginx with 10-15 gunicorns behind it? In the latter case you have proven software that is easy to set-up and scale. If need more, then : - add more nginx/more gunicorns - add haproxy - add DNS balancing So, what's the point?

ers35 14y ago
Adding more servers costs money. Doing more with less saves money. See page 2 of http://gwan.ch/archives/g-wan_case.pdf http://gwan.ch/archives/g-wan_case.pdf.
- daemon13 14y ago
  Well, in my specific case, I am OK with money - 10 VPS ~ $200-600 per month. You spend more on a couple of trips to supermarket. I don't have time and 15 years of programming under my belt.

MetaCosm 14y ago

I played around with this project a couple years ago, so I can give some feedback on my experience. It isn't a con or joke and it isn't full of lies... that said, I still couldn't use it. First of all, it is mostly one guy, and he seems exceptionally bright, and a bit freaking insane (Tesla was crazy but still smart, so it can work). I exchanged a few emails with him that combined with lack of access to the source drove me away from the project. That said, every single claim he made I found to be either valid or an undersell on the actual performance (it did even better than he claimed in my tests). I was rather blown away by the performance, but the risk profile on it just made it unacceptable. Code C-Script (it supports more now, I am aware, but at that point it was C), no source, [possibly] nutjob one man show, no ability to easily hire people to work on it (which to be fair is entirely chicken and egg). But, it is still a project I watch with mild interest... and I do encourage people to try it (great comment on this thread how to run it as a user http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4110247 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4110247) and try it out, if nothing else it is extremely opinionated software, and it really is borderline insanely fast.

riccardot 14y ago

I cannot access the forum. It seems he has blocked the forum. This really puts me off. I find C-scripts really cool and the performance are really fast. I do not think there is a better server to run C-based web sites