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Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server

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

#81

Post by xmodem »

zeroCalories wrote: post #79
xmodem wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jetty implements both TLS and compression, though in environments where I don't already have automated certificate issuance infrastructure in place I have occasionally deployed caddy as a reverse proxy just for the TLS termination.

Something like nginx will likely perform far better at serving static content and other cacheable requests. Also allows you to run two binaries at once for a rolling update.

> likely perform far better at serving static content and other cacheable requests.

But at the cost of having a separate build step that deploys your static assets somewhere. Jetty is actually pretty fast - I've built some fairly high-volume internal apps this way.

> Also allows you to run two binaries at once for a rolling update.

You don't necessarily need an extra reverse proxy layer for this, though I will concede in some environments it's probably the easiest way to achieve it.

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

#82

Post by fny »

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.

But that is the general case. Most web apps are written in interpreted languages like JavaScript which benefit from a reverse proxy. If I remember correctly, NGINX became popular because of Rails.

Maybe in Java-land it’s overused, but everywhere else it makes sense.

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

#83

Post by matja »

sph wrote: post #67
ironhaven wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Http/1.1 is dead simple if you ignore most of the spec. If you only take get requests and set content-length on response you will be good for 99% of user agents. It’s not much more code to handle the transfer-encoding and byte-range headers. HTTPS is just http over a tls socket which is the level of abstraction you should have if you don’t roll your own crypto. It’s fun and not that bad really.

Why HTTP/1.1? Everybody speaks HTTP/1.0 and it is even simpler.

Lack of IP(v4) addresses. HTTP/1.0 sends no Host header, so cannot implement name-based virtual hosts. HTTP/1.1 does.

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

#84

Post by dartos »

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 run many server programs on my homelab.

Each is running on a different port, but I want them all accessible publicly from different URLs and I only want to expose port 443 to the internet.

I also want to have TLS autorefresh for each domain.

I need a reverse proxy for the former and caddy does both.

If you’re running a single server and that server does TLS termination then you don’t really need a reverse proxy.

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

#85

Post by dartos »

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.

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

#86

Post by kragen »

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…

this looks much more practical than my own small and lightweight http/1.0 webserver, but i'm guessing that rws is not nearly as small and lightweight: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/httpdito-readme

the really surprising thing about that was that when your memory map only has five 4k pages in it, linux gets really fast at forking

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

#87

Post by lnenad »

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.

> but in production (with a single host) it allows for rolling releases

I mean for me this is pretty much already enough of a reason to always put an rp ahead of my apps. It's requires minimal setup, most of the tools are fire and forget so I see no real downsides. But having the ability to just point it somewhere else, or to split traffic across app replicas, is more than enough.

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

#88

Post by rwmj »

kragen wrote: post #86
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…

this looks much more practical than my own small and lightweight http/1.0 webserver, but i'm guessing that rws is not nearly as small and lightweight: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/httpdito-readme the really surprising thing about that was that when your memory map only has five 4k pages in it, linux gets really fast at forking

It operated in the real world (of 20 years ago), and supported in-process dlopened modules which is how the web-chat was implemented, so it was somewhat non-trivial.

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

#89

Post by tnolet »

dartos wrote: post #84
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 run many server programs on my homelab. Each is running on a different port, but I want them all accessible publicly from different URLs and I only want to expose port 443 to the internet. I also want to have TLS autorefresh for each domain. I need a reverse proxy for the former and caddy does both. If you’re running a single server and that server does TLS termination then you don’t really need a reverse proxy.

e.g. Virtual hosting as we called it in the Apache days

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

#90

Post by kragen »

rwmj wrote: post #88
kragen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this looks much more practical than my own small and lightweight http/1.0 webserver, but i'm guessing that rws is not nearly as small and lightweight: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/httpdito-readme the really surprising thing about that was that when your memory map only has five 4k pages in it, linux gets really fast at forking

It operated in the real world (of 20 years ago), and supported in-process dlopened modules which is how the web-chat was implemented, so it was somewhat non-trivial.

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

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