ehttpd

Welcome to ehttpd 🎉

ehttpd is a thread-based HTTP server library, which can be used to create custom HTTP server applications.

Thread-based design

The rationale behind the thread-based approach is that it is much easier to implement than async/await, subsequently requires less codes, and is – in theory – less error prone.

Furthermore, it also simplifies application development since the developer cannot accidentally stall the entire runtime with a single blocking call – via the OS' scheduler, threads offer much strong concurrency isolation guarantees, which in most environments can even be niced or tweaked if appropriate.

Performance

While the thread-based approach is not the most efficient out there, it's not that bad either. Some wrk benchmarks:

MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, helloworld)

$ wrk -t 64 -c 64 http://localhost:9999/testolope
Running 10s test @ http://localhost:9999/testolope
  64 threads and 64 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency     1.06ms    1.22ms  49.72ms   99.45%
    Req/Sec     0.99k   144.55     1.45k    69.14%
  637486 requests in 10.10s, 31.61MB read
Requests/sec:  63105.97
Transfer/sec:      3.13MB

Old Linux Machine (Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz, helloworld-nokeepalive)

$ wrk -t 64 -c 64 -H "Connection: Close" http://localhost:9999/testolope
Running 10s test @ http://localhost:9999/testolope
  64 threads and 64 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency     5.24ms    8.11ms 192.14ms   96.63%
    Req/Sec   226.54     64.93     1.34k    87.69%
  144670 requests in 10.10s, 7.04MB read
  Socket errors: connect 0, read 144670, write 0, timeout 0
Requests/sec:  14326.33
Transfer/sec:    713.64KB