“Last Tuesday you asked Ingo Molnar, Red Hat kernel hacker,
about the means by which his TUX Web server recently achieved such
fantastic results in SpecWeb99 . He was kind enough to respond with
at-length answers addressing licensing, the reality of threads
under Linux, the realism of benchmarks, and more. Thanks,
Ingo!”
“You appear to have take an “architectural” approach to
designing TUX, so I have some architectural questions.”
“1.The choice of a kernel space implementation is probably going
to be a controversial one. You suggest that HTTP is commonly used
enough to go in the kernel just as TCP/IP did years ago. What
performance or architectural advantages do you see to moving
application protocols into the kernel that cannot be achieved in
user space?”
“Ingo Molnar
The biggest advantage i see is to have encapsulation, security and
performance available to dynamic web applications *at the same
time*.”
“There are various popular ways to create dynamic web content.
Encapsulation, security is provided by CGI, various scripting and
virtual machine models – unpriviledged/prototype/buggy CGIs are
sufficiently isolated both from HTTP protocol details, from the
webserving context, from the web-client and from each other.”
“But all CGI/scripting/virtual-machine models (including
fast-CGI) lack the possibility of performing with ‘maximum
performance’ if the webserver is in another process context.
‘maximum performance’ means that there should be only one context
running (no context switching done), and the application writer
should have the freedom to use C code, or even assembly code. (not
that using assembly in web-applications would be too common.)”