Re: generalizing khttpd

Alex Belits (abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us)
Thu, 10 Jun 1999 19:28:31 -0700 (PDT)


On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Christoph Lameter wrote:

> which would send the file contents directly onto the socket right?
>
> something like send_file(filehandle,sockethandle)

no, this is sendfile() and it already exists. khttpd is supposed to avoid
syscalls and context switches -- things that can be optimized but will be
there as long as there is userspace program that answers to requests.

Personally I find that efforts to make serving static pages by HTTP (and
only static pages by http and maybe ftp) from userspace are so
ridiculously overdone (threads aio, signals, sendfile), and they hurt
non-static-files server perrformance and functionality so much (by forcing
unsuitable processing model on programmers that write modules for those
servers), moving this into kernel can be the lesser evil if not a
blessing.

If there will be a reasonable way to tell the in-kernel server from
userspace, what set of URLs should be mapped to what files, it will be
enough to perform this task in fast and secure way, leaving all complex
work to userspace server.

-- 
Alex

---------------------------------------------------------------------- Excellent.. now give users the option to cut your hair you hippie! -- Anonymous Coward

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