3 ms·

Having written pages, by hand, for ages now (like 15 years or so), I recently took this to a new level. I'm now hosting my site on my own hand coded webserver a

by pyalot2 13y ago

Having written pages, by hand, for ages now (like 15 years or so), I recently took this to a new level. I'm now hosting my site on my own hand coded webserver and no other server in front (please don't make me explain).

imdsm 13y ago
Please DO explain. I'm going to guess at a PHP based site? I couldn't imagine trying to run my personal website (https://github.com/Imdsm/PersonalWebsite/ https://github.com/Imdsm/PersonalWebsite/) on a hand-written web server and database server, though if I did that would be an achievement.
- laumars 13y ago
  It could be something like Go or Java which would provide the basic framework for you and "all" you need to do is write the handlers (this is how my latest project is written) rather than writing their own HTTP classes and just using the languages TCP/IP libraries. However I too would be interested in reading more about the previous commenter's set up.
  - ptr 13y ago
    The first library I did for my compiled experimental PL was a HTTP server, pretty similar to what you describe. I wonder about the performance and reliability of libraries like those (Go's http package, Ruby Sinatra/WEBrick, etc.); if they can be used in production.
profil 13y ago
Please explain! And if you dont want to explain, please show some code? This sounds really interesting.
- pyalot2 13y ago
  Well here goes. My site is this http://codeflow.org/ http://codeflow.org/ I haven't been terribly happy with Apache, it's, fast-ish, but configuring it is pain. Also dispatching dynamic requests via (whatever mod-wsgi or something) isn't quite as fast. I've run cherokee for the last couple of years, but have my own grievances with that (doesn't support gzip+content-length, impossible to hand edit configuration, kinda slow, that kind of thing again). I've had run-ins with nginx, and it's pretty cool, except configuring it is a giant pain. Also, it still isn't dispatching dynamic requests as fast as could be (goes trough a socket to another process or whatever). Then there's stuff that no webserver out there does really satisfactory, which is low-latency websockets. Reason is that they proxy the websockets trough to another process, and even though it's on the local machine, this just drives latency up by whole dozens of milliseconds... Ok, so what's my obsession with speed all about? My capital is strictly limited, so I've got to run whatever I want to run on my own VPS. Unfortunately I started running http://webglstats.com/ http://webglstats.com/ the tracker of which is embedded in some 500 other sites. They shuffle traffic me at a rate of between 5-10 stat impressions per second, and each of those triggers 3 requests (two gets, one post). I concurrently run around 50-150 open connections at all times. So naturally I'd want the tracker to run as fast as I can, and I'd like my other web properties not to slow down because I run a high-traffic service on that server. And I found that pretty much everything out there just isn't very good at that. So having had finally enough after years, I wrote my own. It's about 1500 lines of python, it's asynchronous, can do http-pipelining, has a dynamic dispatch router that can do things like vhosts, has an inotify integration so it avoids stat'ing static files all the time, it lets me plug python modules directly into the webserver (so no more subprocesses/sockets/fastcgi/whatever for dynamic requests). It does around 4000 requests/s, it easily does at least 512 concurrent open connections, it peaks at a troughput on localhost of +300mb/s and it does that while maintaining a maximum latency (on localhost) of 2ms, or outside (across about 6 hops) of around 15ms. I'm happy with that, and now that the I spent the last two weeks writing that server (it's not the first I wrote, but I finally took the leap), I'm 100% sure that whatever problem I encounter in my hosting adventures, I can make my server solve them.
lemonberry 13y ago
That's cool. I tried setting up a linode server to host my own sites and FAIL. I'll tackle it again when I've got more time. I'd like to do this using erlang or elixir.

by pyalot2 13y ago

imdsm 13y ago

Please DO explain. I'm going to guess at a PHP based site? I couldn't imagine trying to run my personal website (https://github.com/Imdsm/PersonalWebsite/ https://github.com/Imdsm/PersonalWebsite/) on a hand-written web server and database server, though if I did that would be an achievement.

laumars 13y ago
It could be something like Go or Java which would provide the basic framework for you and "all" you need to do is write the handlers (this is how my latest project is written) rather than writing their own HTTP classes and just using the languages TCP/IP libraries. However I too would be interested in reading more about the previous commenter's set up.
- ptr 13y ago
  The first library I did for my compiled experimental PL was a HTTP server, pretty similar to what you describe. I wonder about the performance and reliability of libraries like those (Go's http package, Ruby Sinatra/WEBrick, etc.); if they can be used in production.

profil 13y ago

Please explain! And if you dont want to explain, please show some code? This sounds really interesting.

pyalot2 13y ago
Well here goes. My site is this http://codeflow.org/ http://codeflow.org/ I haven't been terribly happy with Apache, it's, fast-ish, but configuring it is pain. Also dispatching dynamic requests via (whatever mod-wsgi or something) isn't quite as fast. I've run cherokee for the last couple of years, but have my own grievances with that (doesn't support gzip+content-length, impossible to hand edit configuration, kinda slow, that kind of thing again). I've had run-ins with nginx, and it's pretty cool, except configuring it is a giant pain. Also, it still isn't dispatching dynamic requests as fast as could be (goes trough a socket to another process or whatever). Then there's stuff that no webserver out there does really satisfactory, which is low-latency websockets. Reason is that they proxy the websockets trough to another process, and even though it's on the local machine, this just drives latency up by whole dozens of milliseconds... Ok, so what's my obsession with speed all about? My capital is strictly limited, so I've got to run whatever I want to run on my own VPS. Unfortunately I started running http://webglstats.com/ http://webglstats.com/ the tracker of which is embedded in some 500 other sites. They shuffle traffic me at a rate of between 5-10 stat impressions per second, and each of those triggers 3 requests (two gets, one post). I concurrently run around 50-150 open connections at all times. So naturally I'd want the tracker to run as fast as I can, and I'd like my other web properties not to slow down because I run a high-traffic service on that server. And I found that pretty much everything out there just isn't very good at that. So having had finally enough after years, I wrote my own. It's about 1500 lines of python, it's asynchronous, can do http-pipelining, has a dynamic dispatch router that can do things like vhosts, has an inotify integration so it avoids stat'ing static files all the time, it lets me plug python modules directly into the webserver (so no more subprocesses/sockets/fastcgi/whatever for dynamic requests). It does around 4000 requests/s, it easily does at least 512 concurrent open connections, it peaks at a troughput on localhost of +300mb/s and it does that while maintaining a maximum latency (on localhost) of 2ms, or outside (across about 6 hops) of around 15ms. I'm happy with that, and now that the I spent the last two weeks writing that server (it's not the first I wrote, but I finally took the leap), I'm 100% sure that whatever problem I encounter in my hosting adventures, I can make my server solve them.

lemonberry 13y ago

That's cool. I tried setting up a linode server to host my own sites and FAIL. I'll tackle it again when I've got more time. I'd like to do this using erlang or elixir.