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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

#91

Post by zeroCalories »

xmodem wrote: post #81
zeroCalories wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conced…

You don't necessarily need to deploy your static content anywhere, you can just set nginx to cache your content.

Also, most other rolling update solutions will end up being more complex than having a reverse proxy. What do you have in mind that would be simpler? NixOS?

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

#92

Post by a2128 »

bosch_mind wrote: post #8
system7rocks wrote: post #5

This is amazing. Seriously, more things should be custom-coded. Why not?

For fun, sure. Small mistake can be big security nightmare

For a blog? If you don't put anything important on the server itself I can't imagine a hacker could do much. Maybe put a nasty image on your front page, or put their Bitcoin address pretending it's the place to send donations, but it would take a lot of time and effort to remain hidden for hardly any gain.

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

#93

Post by kopirgan »

Like this sort of approach.. Go back to basics and use what's strictly required. Remember McNealy (?) once said you can choose dozen different shapes Microsoft word uses to highlight spelling errors or something to that effect.

There's lots of bloat in practically every software not sure how much it affects performance but it's nice to build something from scratch.

Congrats to developer

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

#94

Post by whiterknight »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #57
whiterknight wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000 lines are easier to secure than 5 million lines

Not if 1000 lines are written by you alone and not checked by anyone else vs 5 million lines of code written by thousands of people and checked by countless more. Linux is probably more secure than 1000 lines of C code from a junior developer.

I think this is vastly overrated:

- how much code actually gets read outside of top 2-3 projects?

- how many of those readers can detect security problems?

- why are others inherently better at detecting problems than the author?

Wouldn’t 1000 lines read by 2 people be better than a million read by 10?

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

#96

Post by johnisgood »

rwmj wrote: post #66
cozzyd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a simple embedded C webserver to provide a liveview of data acquisition for one of my experiments that weighs in at <250LOC. Ok, I wouldn't put it on the public internet, and it only implements a small fraction of HTTP/1.1, but it works and only requires mallocing at initialization...

If you control the client, you can make webservers that are very small indeed. Here's one we use for local testing, where we know the client will be libcurl and know exactly what requests will be made: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/blob/master/tests/web-ser... Basically 600 LoC. It would be completely insecure if exposed to the internet, but (by design) it can only serve over Unix domain sockets.

Neat!

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

#97

Post by rwmj »

kragen wrote: post #90
rwmj wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 threads. It also had a cool inversion of control where you could write straight through code and it was turned into event-driven callbacks automatically. The webserver couldn't make use of multiple cores, which was lucky because the server had only 1 CPU!

Also used a pool allocator, which is very well suited to server applications.

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

#98

Post by petee »

Aside, if you want to write C apps but aren't comfortable writing the public facing parts, 'Kore' is a great framework with some handy builtins like ACME cert management, Pgsql, curl, websockets, etc.

Essentially build and run modules, and they can be combined (including mixing Lua/Python + C.)

https://kore.io/

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

#99

Post by okasaki »

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…

You're missing vhosts, TLS, caching, logging, and log analysis, access control, rate limiting, custom error messages, metrics, etc.

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

#100

Post by ggliv »

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…

This is a neat perspective. I’ve heard conversation on how working with different programming languages affects how you code (“learn Haskell, it’ll make you think more functionally!”) but for some reason I never connected it to the linguistic side of things.

I remember learning about the effects of language on cognition in a psychology course I took a while ago, it’s interesting to think about how that could apply more broadly.

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