Lwan Web Server

Lwan is a high-performance & scalable web server for glibc/Linux platforms.

In development for almost 4 years, Lwan was until now a personal research effort that focused mostly on building a solid infrastructure for a lightweight and speedy web server:

Low memory footprint (~500KiB for 10k idle connections)
Minimal memory allocations & copies
Minimal system calls
Hand-crafted HTTP request parser
Files are served using the most efficient way according to their size
- No copies between kernel and userland for files larger than 16KiB
- Smaller files are sent using vectored I/O of memory-mapped buffers
- Header overhead is considered before compressing small files
Mostly wait-free multi-threaded design
Diminute code base with roughly 7200 lines of C code

It is now transitioning into a fully working, capable HTTP server. It is not, however, as feature-packed as other popular web servers. But it is free software, so scratching your own itches and making Lwan hum the way you want it to is possible.

Features include:

Mustache templating engine
- Used for directory listing & error messages
- Available for user-built handlers
Easy to use API to create web applications or extend the web server
Supports rebimboca da parafuseta
Test suite written in Python tests the server as a black box
No-nonsense configuration file syntax
Supports a subset of HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1
systemd socket activation
IPv6 ready

The web site has more details, including a FAQ about the name of the project and security concerns.

Performance

It can achieve good performance, yielding about 320000 requests/second on a Core i7 laptop for requests without disk access, and without pipelining.

When disk I/O is required, for files up to 16KiB, it yields about 290000 requests/second; for larger files, this drops to 185000 requests/second, which isn’t too shabby either.

These results, of course, with keep-alive connections, and with weighttp running on the same machine (and thus using resources that could be used for the webserver itself).

Without keep-alive, these numbers drop around 6-fold.

Portability

Although it uses epoll and the Linux variant of sendfile(), it is fairly portable to other event-based pollers, like kqueue.

Porting for FreeBSD and OS X is a work in progress. It works on FreeBSD, but the module registry can’t find any module and/or handlers (so it’s essentially only serves 404 pages at the moment). Help to fix this is appreciated.

Building

Before installing Lwan, ensure all dependencies are installed. All of them are common dependencies found in any GNU/Linux distribution; package names will be different, but it shouldn’t be difficult to search using whatever package management tool that’s used by your distribution.

Required dependencies

CMake, at least version 2.8
ZLib

Optional dependencies

The build system will look for these libraries and enable/link if available.

SQLite 3
Lua 5.1 or LuaJIT 2.0
Client libraries for either MySQL or MariaDB
TCMalloc
jemalloc
Valgrind
To run test suite:
- Python (2.6+) with Requests
- Lua 5.1
To run benchmark :
- Special version of Weighttp
- Matplotlib

Common operating system package names

Minimum to build

ArchLinux: pacman -S cmake zlib
FreeBSD: pkg install cmake pkgconf
Ubuntu 14+: apt-get update && apt-get install git cmake zlib1g-dev pkg-config

Build all examples

ArchLinux: pacman -S cmake zlib sqlite luajit libmariadbclient gperftools valgrind
FreeBSD: pkg install cmake pkgconf sqlite3 lua51
Ubuntu 14+: apt-get update && apt-get install git cmake zlib1g-dev pkg-config lua5.1-dev libsqlite3-dev libmysqlclient-dev

Build commands

Clone the repository

~$ git clone git://github.com/lpereira/lwan
~$ cd lwan

Create the build directory

~/lwan$ mkdir build
~/lwan$ cd build

Select build type

Selecting a release version (no debugging symbols, messages, enable some optimizations, etc):

~/lwan/build$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

If you’d like to enable optimiations but still use a debugger, use this instead:

~/lwan/build$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo

To disable optimizations and build a more debugging-friendly version:

~/lwan/build$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

Build Lwan

~/lwan/build$ make

This will generate a few binaries:

lwan/lwan: The main Lwan executable. May be executed with --help for guidance.
testrunner/testrunner: Contains code to execute the test suite.
freegeoip/freegeoip: FreeGeoIP sample implementation. Requires SQLite.
techempower/techempower: Code for the Techempower Web Framework benchmark. Requires SQLite and MySQL libraries.
common/mimegen: Builds the extension-MIME type table. Used during build process.

Remarks

It is important to build outside of the tree; in-tree builds are not supported.

Passing -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release will enable some compiler optimizations (such as LTO) and tune the code for current architecture. Please use this version when benchmarking, as the default is the Debug build, which not only logs all requests to the standard output, but does so while holding a mutex.

The default build (i.e. not passing -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release) will build a version suitable for debugging purposes. This version can be used under Valgrind, is built with Undefined Behavior Sanitizer, and includes debugging messages that are stripped in the release version. Debugging messages are printed for each and every request.

Tests

~/lwan/build$ make teststuite

This will compile testrunner/testrunner and execute regression test suite in tool/testsuite.py.

Benchmark

~/lwan/build$ make benchmark

This will compile testrunner/testrunner and execute benchmark script tools/benchmark.py.

Running

Set up the server by editing the provided lwan.conf; the format is very simple and should be self-explanatory.

Configuration files are loaded from the current directory. If no changes are made to this file, running Lwan will serve static files located in the ./wwwroot directory. Lwan will listen on port 8080 on all interfaces.

Lwan will detect the number of CPUs, will increase the maximum number of open file descriptors and generally try its best to autodetect reasonable settings for the environment it’s running on.

Optionally, the lwan binary can be used for one-shot static file serving without any configuration file. Run it with --help for help on that.

IRC Channel

There is an IRC channel (#lwan) on Freenode. A standard IRC client can be used. A web IRC gateway is also available.

Lwan in the wild

Here’s a non-definitive list of third-party stuff that uses Lwan and have been seen in the wild. Help build this list!

An experimental version of Node.js using Lwan as its HTTP server is maintained by @raadad.
The beginnings of a C++11 web framework based on Lwan written by @vileda.
A more complete C++14 web framework by @matt-42 offers Lwan as one of its backends.
A word ladder sample program by @sjnam. Demo.
A Shodan search listing some brave souls that expose Lwan to the public internet.

Some other distribution channels were made available as well:

A Dockerfile is maintained by @jaxgeller, and is available from the Docker registry.
A buildpack for Heroku is maintained by @bherrera, and is available from its repo.
Lwan is also available as a package in Biicode.
User packages for Arch Linux and Ubuntu.

Lwan has been also used as a benchmark:

Raphael Javaux’s master thesis cites Lwan in chapter 5 (“Performance Analysis”).
Lwan is used as a benchmark by the PyParallel author.
Kong uses Lwan as the backend API in its benchmark.
TechEmpower Framework benchmarks feature Lwan since round 10.
KrakenD used Lwan for the REST API in all official benchmarks