tinyhttpd

tinyhttpd is a minimum functional HTTP server written in the C programming language.

Compile and run

For now tinyhttpd only support Linux 2.6 or later.

Please make sure you have cmake installed.

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. && make
cd .. && ./build/tinyhttpd &

By default the server runs on port 8008, if you want to assign other port for the server, run it as ./build/tinyhttpd port &.

In order to avoid showing too much stdout/stderr message, you can run ./build/tinyhttpd [port] 2>&1 >tinyhttpd.log & to redirect both stdout and stderr to a log file.

Programming model

• epoll
• non-blocking I/O
• threadpool

Performance

I have made a small performance test with Zaver, a fast and efficient HTTP server(I have learned a lot from it). In a way it was not a fair comparasion, for the number of total transferred bytes was not equal and the processing logic in tinyhttpd is relatively simple.

ab -n 10000 -c 500 http://127.0.1.1:8008/doc/index.html

cpu: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           L5630  @ 2.13GHz, 4 cores.
mem: 32GB.

Zaver

Server Software:        Zaver
Server Hostname:        0.0.0.0
Server Port:            3000

Document Path:          /html/index.html
Document Length:        170 bytes

Concurrency Level:      500
Time taken for tests:   10.172 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Non-2xx responses:      10000
Total transferred:      2760000 bytes
HTML transferred:       1700000 bytes
Requests per second:    983.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       508.594 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.017 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          264.98 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    3   7.9      0      47
Processing:   499  502   6.2    501     547
Waiting:        0    2   3.9      1      30
Total:        499  505  12.6    501     564

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    501
  66%    502
  75%    502
  80%    502
  90%    507
  95%    547
  98%    558
  99%    562
 100%    564 (longest request)
 

tinyhttpd

Server Software:
Server Hostname:        127.0.1.1
Server Port:            8008

Document Path:          /doc/index.html
Document Length:        173 bytes

Concurrency Level:      500
Time taken for tests:   3.695 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      2170000 bytes
HTML transferred:       1730000 bytes
Requests per second:    2706.40 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       184.747 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.369 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          573.52 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0   88 381.2      0    3005
Processing:    10   55  33.2     44     456
Waiting:       10   54  33.2     44     456
Total:         41  143 385.8     45    3259

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     45
  66%     50
  75%     55
  80%     61
  90%    151
  95%   1049
  98%   1061
  99%   3053
 100%   3259 (longest request)