ehttpd

Welcome to ehttpd 🎉

ehttpd is a HTTP server library, which can be used to create custom HTTP server applications. It also offers an optional built-in threadpool-based server for simple applications (feature: server, disabled by default).

Threadpool-based server

The rationale behind the thread-based approach is that it is much easier to implement than async/await, subsequently requires less code, 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; being managed by the OS-scheduler, threads offer much stronger concurrency isolation guarantees (which can even be niced or tweaked in most environments if desired).

Note that, starting with version 0.9, the built-in server is an optional feature and needs to be enabled using the server feature.

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, v0.7.1)

$ 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     1.00ms  520.00us  27.29ms   95.96%
    Req/Sec     1.02k   262.37     6.00k    94.81%
  654074 requests in 10.10s, 32.44MB read
Requests/sec:  64756.19
Transfer/sec:      3.21MB

Old Linux Machine (Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz, helloworld-nokeepalive, v0.7.0)

$ 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     2.22ms    1.00ms  60.93ms   95.30%
    Req/Sec   435.19     56.94     1.00k    85.05%
  278046 requests in 10.10s, 18.83MB read
Requests/sec:  27528.42
Transfer/sec:      1.86MB