What is Lwan?
In development for almost 3 years, Lwan was until now a personal research effort that focused mostly on building a solid infrastructure for a lightweight and speedy web server.
Lwan is a tool in the Web Servers category of a tech stack.
Lwan is an open source tool with 6K GitHub stars and 549 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Lwan's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Lwan?
Developers
Pros of Lwan
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Lwan's Features
- Low memory footprint (~500KiB for 10k idle connections)
- Minimal memory allocations & copies
- Minimal system calls
- Hand-crafted HTTP request parser
- Static file serving uses the most efficient way according to file size
- No copies between kernel and userland for files larger than 16KiB
- Smaller files are sent using vectored I/O
- Header overhead is considered before considering deflate compression
- Mostly wait-free multi-threaded design
- One thread accepts connections, one I/O thread per logical CPU handles them
- Hand-crafted coroutines makes asynchronous I/O a breeze in C
- Linux only, as it relies on epoll()
- Purpose-built I/O loop
- Efficient loading cache used for
- Directory listing
- File information (size, last modified date, MIME type, etc)
- Compressed files
- Diminute codebase with roughly 7200 lines of C code
Lwan Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Lwan?
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.
Amazon EC2
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Firebase
Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
It is a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally.
