

G-WAN - High-performing HTTP server, scriptable using ANSI C - cgbystrom
http://gwan.ch/

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jws
Interesting?

✓ web server + ssl + dynamic content

✓ runs on linux

✓+ superlative performance claims

✓ free

☹ binary only download?

☹ no source?

☹ tenuous legal reasoning displayed on web site

No thanks.

(And I wish Unicode added the WTF glyph for posts like this.
<http://www.typophile.com/node/16343> )

~~~
madhouse
The title of the website filled with keywords, making no sense at all isn't
all that reassuring either.

The colorset also makes half the site unreadable.

That, and all of the above: no thanks.

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tlack
I wonder how fast nginx would be with C scripts for modules, rebuilding
executables as needed using file mtime? Might be worth the experiment. For
things like presence servers and COMET, it makes sense to code in C. Anyone
else interested in exploring this subject?

Edit: Found this "comparison" <http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/G-WAN_vs_Nginx>
which I suspect was written by the GWAN guy himself judging from the unusual
sentence structure and phraseology. Independent confirmation necessary.

~~~
wmf
_For things like presence servers and COMET, it makes sense to code in C._

I wouldn't assume that. Just using async I/O (e.g. Erlang, Node.js) instead of
blocking I/O gives a huge performance advantage for those use cases, and if
you need even more performance there are compiled-but-safe languages like Go
(and maybe someday Rust). Due to its unsafe nature, I would leave C/C++ as a
tool of last resort.

~~~
tlack
It's like not you're sharing needles with a heroin addict by using C. :)

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leenewton
Why does the site for this product read like it's trying to sell me age
defying supplements?

Worth a quick eval but the site leaves a bad taste.

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patrickc
If my understanding is correct, rather than creating a new thread for each
client request, it handles connections asynchronously, much like Nginx. But
unlike Nginx, it uses only a single process, so it doesn't require any
interprocess communication overhead. Too bad they don't release the source
code.

