G-WAN Web Server Claims Speed Records, Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: G-WAN Web Server Claims Speed Records, Features

While it hasn't been talked about much recently, still in existence and seeing new releases is G-WAN, a free but binary-only web server. G-WAN makes claims of being much faster than Apache, IIS, Nginx, and other web-serving alternatives...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE0MzM

[ppanula]

How can they claim they are faster than nginx, do they somehow make IO and CPU go faster, overclocks them?-) bogus...

[babali]

Well they do slow the cpu clock so, they have better benchmark ;-)

(joke inside).

[julian_fern]

Michael, if possible, i would like a benchmark. I use Nginx, and would love to see if G-WAN could beat Nginx in speed and resource usage.

[moonlite]

Having free access to the source is important if you are the least worried about the future of the software you are using. I find the comment ignorant and a bit absurd.

[DoDoENT]

Michael, if possible, i would like a benchmark. I use Nginx, and would love to see if G-WAN could beat Nginx in speed and resource usage.

+1 for benchmark

Being faster than nginx or lighttpd is really something difficult to achieve. I would really like to see G-WAN outperforming those servers.

[mewtwo]

I would also be curious how it compares to gatling.

[AJenbo]

I would love you see there claims put to the test as well. Putting Varnish in front of most servers largely solves any speed issues you might have any way.

Having free access to the source is important if you are the least worried about the future of the software you are using. I find the comment ignorant and a bit absurd.

They defiantly don't seam to have the best attitude. Having access to the source is a benefit if you want to extend it with features that you need to use it. Verify the security of the thing ect.

[curaga]

Monkey is 60kb, faster than gwan, and open source (gplv2). gwan beating apache and lighty is believable, for nginx it depends (nginx default config is absolute crap and doesn't scale).

See
http://monkey.io/benchmarks/x86_64_monkey_gwan


Disclaimer: I'm working on monkey this gsoc.

[foobrain]

A little while ago I was intrigued by GWAN's performance and decided to understand how it works. Using strace and other tools, I figured some things out and began working on an opensource alternative using just the general idea of its architecture (event-based, 1 thread per CPU, etc)... it's been a while since I've ran GWAN, but there were times my web server was actually faster -- but it isn't as feature packed, so that's not really a fair comparison. I'll perform some tests comparing with GWAN again another day.

In any case, feel free to grab it at http://github.com/lpereira/lwan (be sure to check the 'wip' branch) and try it for yourself. It's quite small (~2500 LOC of C code), runs on Linux/glibc only and does not support SSL, but I've been working on it only during my free time.