Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#101

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

yard2010 wrote: post #51

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #29

Awesome! I used to think (well, I still do) that getting a barebones service up and running using the system APIs at the lowest level like this is so satisfying. It's sort of magical, really. And to see it serve real traffic! I'm kind of surprised that the vanilla poll() can put up numbers like you were seeing, but I guess it's been a while since I've had to do anything event related/benchmark at that level. I love t…

Working with c/cpp in uni exploded my mind. It's such a specific humbling experience that has a bit of anything I love - engineering, history, culture, linguistics, etc. It made me think that anyone should know and try every possible language (programming or otherwise) - "thinking" in a language is such a unique experience. The different contexts make everything feel different, even though it's more of the same. The…

It’s kind of sad how C has gotten the reputation as this dangerous and scary dark art that only wizards can successfully wield. C was my first love, it’s what we used throughout university, it’s what our operating systems and basic tools are all written in... If you go to your favorite language and step down into the actual implementation of, for example, your network calls, you’re eventually going to get to poll() and write() written in C. It’s useful to know and be fluent in regardless of whether you intend to work on large projects in C.

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#102

Post by rollcat » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 2:43 PM UTC

xmodem wrote: post #80

fny wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most web applications are not written in Java. NGINX also allows static assets to be served directly while side-stepping the application server. This is a boon for interpreted languages.

And that is a perfectly valid performance reason for adding an nginx layer in front. It does not IMO justify it in the general case however.

I agree with fny's comment, and add that most "application servers" don't bother with things like supporting sendfile(2); e.g. when hosting a Python application, you need to add something like Whitenoise, and integrate it with your application somehow; that's extra development work that is sometimes easier to throw over the fence at the sysadmin (especially since the sysadmin will usually already have that part of their job automated).

I'd also say that there is no such thing as a "general case"; I've launched and/or supported countless (must be hundreds?) of web projects and even the "simple" ones were each a bit of a snowflake.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sendfile.2.html

https://whitenoise.readthedocs.io/

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#103

Post by mistrial9 » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

dartos wrote: post #85

xmodem wrote: post #70

> No reverse proxies required! This is one that has always baffled me. If there's no specific reason that a reverse proxy is helpful, I will often hang an app with an embedded Jetty out on the internet without one. This has never lead to any problems. Infra or security people will see this and ask why I don't have an nginx instance in front of it. When I ask why I need one, the answers are all hand-wavy security or p…

I don’t really care think there is a general case for all servers. For the minimal case you don’t need it, but in production (with a single host) it allows for rolling releases, compression, TLS, fast static file serving, potentially A/B testing capabilities. The layer of indirection between the request and your server can be very useful.

caching -- google changed the expectations of millions

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#104

Post by kragen » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:16 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #97

kragen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, i'm assuming, comet, and thus long-lived connections that were in communication with each other, whereas httpdito spawns off a separate child process for each request and thus can fob off all the memory allocation and i/o multiplexing work onto the kernel comet was a pretty compelling reason to write your own web server 20 years ago

Not sure what comet is in this context? The chat code [I really should upload the code as the company has been dead for at least 10-15 years] worked by browsers holding an infinitely loading frame, so each client held open a connection for several hours. IIRC there was some Javascript that reloaded the connection after a few hours. To handle 1000s of HTTP connections we had to implement our own fairly lightweight thr…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) is browsers holding an infinitely loading frame, so each client held open a connection for several hours. usually we included tags in that infinitely loading frame so the events could do whatever instead of just adding more text somewhere off the screen below the current scroll position. an alternative way to do comet is to close the connection when there's an event and have the client reload the frame

nowadays people use websockets for comet

yeah, protothreads type stuff and pool allocators are great fits for that kind of work

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#105

Post by nickpsecurity » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:19 PM UTC

xmodem wrote: post #70

> No reverse proxies required! This is one that has always baffled me. If there's no specific reason that a reverse proxy is helpful, I will often hang an app with an embedded Jetty out on the internet without one. This has never lead to any problems. Infra or security people will see this and ask why I don't have an nginx instance in front of it. When I ask why I need one, the answers are all hand-wavy security or p…

My answer applies to a number of types of servers that sit in front of web applications. You asked about security and performance. I’ll give you a few ways that an extra box can help in those areas.

For security, you want a strong OS with this little code as possible in your overall system. Proxy-style apps can be very simple compared to web, application servers. They can filter incoming traffic, validate the input, or even change it to something safer (or faster) to parse. They can also run on OS’s that are harder to attack: OpenBSD; GenodeOS; INTEGRITY-178B. On availability, putting load-balancing, monitoring, and recovery in these systems is often safer since app servers are more likely to crash.

On performance, the first benefit is that the simple, focused app can have a highly-optimized implementation. From there, one can use hardware accelerators (CPU or PCI) to speed up compression or encryption. Also called offloading. The most, cost-effective setup has many commodity servers benefiting from a few, high-cost servers capable of offloading. Some have load-balancing to route incoming traffic to servers able to handle it best to minimize use of costly resources.

So, there’s a few ways that proxy-type servers can help in security and performance.

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#106

Post by codegeek » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:20 PM UTC

xmodem wrote: post #70

> No reverse proxies required! This is one that has always baffled me. If there's no specific reason that a reverse proxy is helpful, I will often hang an app with an embedded Jetty out on the internet without one. This has never lead to any problems. Infra or security people will see this and ask why I don't have an nginx instance in front of it. When I ask why I need one, the answers are all hand-wavy security or p…

For me, Reverse proxy helps me keep my origin server only for 1 purpose: Serve the Application. Everything else, I can handle with Reverse Proxy including TLS Termination, load balancing, URL rewrites, Security (WAF etc) if needed. Separation of duties for me.

Overall, the benefit is that you can keep your origin server protected and only serve relevant traffic. Also, lets say you offer custom domain to your own customers and in that case, you could always swap out the origin server (if needed) without worrying about DNS changes for your customers as they are pointing to the reverse proxy and not your origin server directly.

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#107

Post by adamrezich » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:34 PM UTC

Very cool! I was working on something similar at one point, but I sort of gave up on it when I wanted to move it from the "toy server that works on localhost" stage to something that I could actually deploy in the wild. I got overwhelmed by decision paralysis for how to proceed: should I just use a reverse proxy? Or should I rewrite my backend code to be some kind of plugin for some existing server software? If so, what kind of plugin, and for which software?

It's very inspirational to see that you've just said screw it, I'm going to host my own HTTPS server, and also hey reddit, do your worst, try to break it. Now I want to work on my similar project again.

For anyone similarly inspired, but who doesn't know where to begin making an HTTP server, check out this excellent tutorial that walks you through everything you need to make an HTTP/1.0 server, and then grow it to handle HTTP/1.1: https://www2.cs.uh.edu/~gnawali/courses/cosc6377-f12/p1/http...

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#108

Post by eqvinox » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:55 PM UTC

interroboink wrote: post #32

afavour wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any site with a CDN in front of it can do that. Don’t get me wrong this is an awesome project but if you really care about this kind of thing in a production scenario and you’re serving mostly static content… just use a CDN. It’ll pretty much always outperform just about anything you write. It’s just boring.

If you're hosting static data, shouldn't HTTP cache flags be enough in most cases? Read-only cacheable data shouldn't be toppling even a modest server. Even without an explicit CDN, various nodes along the chain will be caching it. (though I confess it's been some years since I've worked in this area)

There are no nodes between you and that server.

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#109

Post by nicoburns » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:57 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #65

Cool! I also wrote my own C web server (sources linked below) which ran a commercial website for a while. It's amazing how small and light you can make an HTTP/1.1 webserver. The commercial site ran on a machine with 128MB of RAM and 1 CPU (sic) and routinely served a large proportion of schools in the UK with a closed source interactive, web-based chat system. However that was 20 years ago when the internet was a sl…

Rust is a good choice for webserver that will run in this footprint without having to worry so much about the hostile internet. My website https://blessed.rs runs on a VM with 256mb of RAM because that was the smallest I can find, but it typically uses ~60mb.

Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

#110

Post by nicoburns » Wed, Sep 25, 2024, 3:58 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #26

greenavocado wrote: post #17

Finally a website that doesn't crash when it shows up on the front page

Any site with a CDN in front of it can do that. Don’t get me wrong this is an awesome project but if you really care about this kind of thing in a production scenario and you’re serving mostly static content… just use a CDN. It’ll pretty much always outperform just about anything you write. It’s just boring.

Pretty much anything that isn't Wordpress is ok these days I think.