Show HN: Hellepoll is a blazingly-fast async HTTP server written in C++

by willvarfar • 15 years ago

35 28 15 years ago

This is based on an approach I made for a very high performance message and video multiplexing server.

The project died, but I'm glad I get to share the a basic version with some http test code now.

I admit this is the second time I've tried to show this off here today; I posted earlier but it got lost when no-one was watching :(

tewks• 15 years ago

I'm curious as to why the author hasn't referenced nginx, which is written also event based (epoll/kqueue) and written in C.

givan• 15 years ago

Probably because is much slower than nginx, C++ adds extra "fat" that nginx (writen in C) doesn't have.

apaprocki2• 15 years ago

Not sure that matters much.. the code style is very C/C++. (e.g. using stdio instead of iostreams, malloc/free instead of new/delete, no STL)

swah2• 15 years ago

If its faster than nginx, Igor just removes some sleep() calls.

sigil• 15 years ago

Not sure about C++ overhead there. C++ often edges out C in the alioth benchmarks. More to the point, I highly doubt the author's parser ("parser") in http.cpp is faster than the one in nginx, which really is a thing of beauty.

http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/browser/nginx/trunk/src/http/ngx...

willvarfar6• 15 years ago

I've used nginx a lot. So I guess that's why I don't see the overlap.

Nginx is not tornado in c. Its not about complex custom logic, its about rules redirects and caching.

WALoeIII• 15 years ago

I immediately wanted to fork this and have it just return "Allan!" instead of "Hello World".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPepCVepCg

apaprocki2• 15 years ago

You should not be #include-ing headers inside of an extern "C" block. It is up to those headers to:

  #ifdef __cplusplus
  extern "C" {
  #endif

humbledrone• 15 years ago

And, if those headers do not already wrap themselves in their own extern "C" block, wrapping around the #include is sometimes a quick fix (e.g. until the upstream authors merge your pull request).

DiabloD3• 15 years ago

This.

Windows porters frequently have to do this to deal with the fact Microsoft still refuses to produce a C compiler, and instead just does double duty on their existing C++ compiler.

CamperBob• 15 years ago

Um, OK, I'll bite. Why not?

kqueue6• 15 years ago

I believe you are testing the requests / sec and not replies / sec. While requests / sec matters a bit, you'll most probably be bottle-necking in your context switches. What matters is replies / sec. This is a more accurate measurement of your server performance and not OS bottlenecks. I'd use httperf for this matter.

willvarfar6• 15 years ago

I am confused. What context switches?

kqueue6• 15 years ago

Measuring requests per second is close to measuring the number of accept system calls you can do. Since it's a system call you have a context switch.

k33n• 15 years ago

Cool stuff. I assume you wrote this for your own personal gratification and not to compete with Nginx or something. What was the coolest thing you learned in putting this together?

enduser• 15 years ago

ULib is a mature and well-considered C++ framework for developing high-performance applications that includes a blazingly-fast async HTTP server--more batteries included.

https://github.com/stefanocasazza/ULib

pilooch• 15 years ago

How does it compare to libevent evhttp server? Besides being written in C++...

Show HN: Hellepoll is a blazingly-fast async HTTP server written in C++

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