XML CO538 Anonymous Questions and Answers Keyword Index

This page provides a keyword index to questions and answers. Clicking on a keyword will take you to a page containing all questions and answers for that keyword, grouped by year.

To submit a question, use the anonymous questions page. You may find the keyword index and/or top-level index useful for locating past questions and answers.

Keyword reference for web-server

Question 123 (2004):

Hey I have been looking at the occam web-server (like you do ;-)) and was wondering if there are plans for any future developments ? It's looks nice and I am looking forward to having a go with it soon...

Answer 123:

Yes, I've/we've got lots of thoughts for future development! It's just a matter of finding the time to do them.. Technical descent: Foremost, perhaps, is sorting out the socket I/O. The mechanism that does this uses OS-level threads (e.g. POSIX threads, aka "pthreads") to prevent blocking network I/O from blocking the occam system whole, but it takes a reasonable amount of time (hundreds of microseconds) to dispatch and collect these. Large numbers of connections mean lots of threads, which quickly kills performance. The solution (thought-out but not implemented quite yet) is to multiplex sockets in groups sorted by activity. In theory, there'll be one thread that goes round very quickly, one that goes round less quickly, down to one that just collects "dead" connections (where the client disappeared rather than closing the TCP socket). We're aiming for better performance than apache (obviously!), but whether or not we'll get there remains to be seen..

Keywords: web-server