httpbeast
Extremely fast HTTP responses in Nim.
This is an experimental project to get the fastest possible HTTP server written in pure Nim.
First phase
The first phase is to build an HTTP server that cheats to get as many req/s as possible (as benchmarked by wrk). This phase is mostly complete.
I benchmarked this by executing it on a 2 vCPU & 2GB Digital Ocean VPS, then
running wrk -c256 -t2 http://ip:8080 on a separate VPS (on the same
private network).
I was able to get it to almost 100k req/s with 2 threads. But keep in mind that
the code cheats a lot, it doesn't parse the headers and it always replies with
the same message.
The reasoning for this is to give me an idea of the top performance I can potentially get out of this code. Obviously my goal is to turn this into a proper HTTP server without sacrificing any performance, but doing so is likely impossible so I will settle for sacrificing as little as possible.
How does wrk work?
(or appear to work?)
wrk seems to simply write the following as fast as possible
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: <ip>:<port>
And at the same time read from each client as quickly as possible and count the number of requests.
Strangely, writing multiple responses really quickly (faster than the requests even come in) increases the requests/sec A LOT.
