A Simple HttpServer

Author: Zhang Hao

Email: zhanghaohit@gmail.com

Supported Features:

• GET method: load static HTML pages/files
• Keep-alive feature
• Disk file updates take effect immediately without restarting the server
• Server-side caching

Highlights:

• Multithreaded server
• Epoll-based event-triggered network handling so that it can handle a huge number of cocurrent connections effeciently.
• Less CPU consumption when idle

Usage:

1. Compile

(in the src directory)
make
(then it will generate a server and client executable files)

2. Run

1) server: the http server

 (you can get the available options by ./server --help)
 ./server
 [--port port (default: 12345)]
 [--bind_addr (default: )]
 [--threads threads (default: 3)]
 [--connections supported_max_connections (default: 10000)]
 [--root_dir root_dir (default: ./)]

2) client: a simple client used to test the performance of the server

 (you can get the available options by ./client --help)
 ./client
 [--ip ip_address (default: localhost)]
 [--port port (default: 12345)]
 [--connections supported_max_connections (default: 10000)]
 [--sockets num_sockets (default: 100)]

3) demo website

 (start the http server)
 ./server --root_dir ../public_html
 
 (access the website)
 open a web brower, then type the url: http://localhost:12345

Some configuration on the max number of open file descriptors supported by the system

1) System-level max number of open file descriptors

 #The number of concurrently open file descriptors throughout the system
 cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max
 
 #if it is too small, edit the /etc/sysctl.conf by adding this
 sfs.file-max = 100000
 #make this take effect
 sudo sysctl -p

2) User-level FD limits

#check the hard limit
ulimit -Hn
#check the soft limit
ulimit -Sn

#if they are too small, edit /etc/security/limits.conf by putting 
* soft nofile 20000
* hard nofile 20000
#to make this take effect without rebooting, edit the /etc/pam.d/common-session by adding
session required pam_limits.so
#then login by su username, it will take effect
su username