I love seeing stuff like this that would probably not exist if not for LLMs making exploring these kinds of ideas relatively cheap and quick to do.
My takeaway from this though is that nginx is pretty impressive on its own. Also this stuck out:
It's meant to be an alternative to nginx and Caddy, and the design bet is about configuration. Those servers give you a declarative config language - location blocks, rewrite rules, map directives, try_files - and then, once the declarative language hits its limits, an optional scripting runtime bolted on the side (Lua, or Caddy's plugins). Behavior ends up split across two layers: directives that quietly grow their own control flow, plus scripts that run somewhere in the request lifecycle you have to keep in your head.
I think the bet is misplaced - people prefer configuration over code and long have. The built-ins meet enough peoples needs entirely and they don't need to write C code.
I'd wager that in the next 96 hours, with a LLM, someone could create a translator that would 'pack' a nginx or caddy configuration file into the relevant code that zeroserve could use. Or even more simply, just pickup all the Ingress manifests in a kubernetes cluster and rebuild the pack. The point being, the interface between the tool and the configuration is just another API, system operators are already describing the state of the system at higher level constructs, and the specific bytes that make up the configuration are an artifact of that.
I suspect it's worth exploring if that will change as AI is allowing more and more "human words -> machine effect", which may be more ergonomic for the AIs. It could take a long time for that kind of shift to become clearly a good idea since the AI can make either work.
Why are you so eager to credit LLMS.. Just because they wrote the article with the help of an LLM doesnt mean they're out here having LLMs do the experiments for them.
The real question is developer commitment and community - the Caddy and Nginx people have worked constantly on supporting their products. It’s going to take a lot of focus and attention.
I think I'd feel more comfortable if I could drop an .rs file into the eBPF dir instead of a .c one. It's already a Rust project! :)
And for some reason I was expecting this to be a kernel-accelerated webserver - if that could be done safely using eBPF that would be amazing!
Also, single-threaded? Forking and sharing an incoming connection queue is basically trivial on Linux, that should be literally just a few lines, even with Rust. Use SO_REUSEPORT and the kernel will do the rest.
FWIW, if you're going to push for io_uring, you should also be pushing kTLS IMO, you'll drastically simplify your design if you can avoid pumping userspace SSL after the handshake.
Very cool! would be interesting to see about combining this with other bpf program types like xdp progs, or socket map attached programs to integrate L7 http features downward.
Depends on the domain. There's a bunch of sciences using large datasets served up efficiently using static file formats, e.g., https://zarr.dev/ and https://parquet.apache.org/
I did last week (converted ghost to static) and was half wondering if some self contained binary wouldn't be faster so I feel like this was made for me, but I accept I'm not the typical user
Looks good, nice features. But somehow the spark does not ignite on my side because it feels too artificial. I don't know if the metrics are faked, if the convenience functions actually work, if there is any proper hardening.
I can accept if stuff is vibe coded and has autogenerated README. But even the announcement blogpost is AI-generated, and I personally have zero data points to see if your understanding of software quality is the same as mine.
It's a weird world, if this would've been announced without any AI disclaimers some years earlier I would've eaten it up without a doubt. But right now if I see a fancy README with several good-looking command line parameters I immediately wonder if the README is hallucinated and the command line parameters actually exist.
Hi, author here - a few critical pieces of this, like async-ebpf, were written long before those coding agents were released. I use AI assistance a lot when creating zeroserve itself, but I manually check AI output and take responsibility for it :)
if the point is to avoid the lua-issue on nginx, how do you expect people will implement things like geoip, request content match post ssl termination, etc?
> It's a weird world, if this would've been announced without any AI disclaimers some years earlier I would've eaten it up without a doubt. But right now if I see a fancy README with several good-looking command line parameters I immediately wonder if the README is hallucinated and the command line parameters actually exist.
Yeah, that is unfortunate. Recently there was this ffmpeg-wasm project. I tested it. It worked. But it was vibe-coded AI. I can't stand AI. Even if things work.
I decided to stay in the oldschool era as much as possible. Clever people publish software. Clever people maintain software. They don't need AI. That's my niche.
We may die out but I still prefer that. (Oh, and only if these clever people write documentation. Many clever people hate writing documentation. I decided a long time ago that if software comes without documentation, it is not worth my time, no matter how great that documentation is. This refers mostly to on-the-application side; I only rarely looked at the Linux documentation, but others stated that it is not too terrible either, so who knows.)
Small static file (174 B) - the bread and butter of static sites:
server req/s p99
zeroserve 36,681 5.4 ms
nginx 31,226 7.8 ms
Caddy 12,830 22 ms
zeroserve serves small files about 17% faster than nginx on a single core, with a tighter tail. HTML pages, small JSON, CSS - this is the case zeroserve is tuned for.
Large static file (100 KB):
server req/s throughput p99
zeroserve 8,000 782 MB/s 22 ms
nginx 7,600 773 MB/s 28 ms
Caddy 6,084 590 MB/s 44 ms
I'd go with a more storied project that's been audited, battle tested, hardened etc than this upstart. There's not enough improvement to justify the risk.
The problem with pasting LLM output is that no human with sound mind and body would waste their finite time on this Earth informing you that small static files are "the bread and butter of static sites".
Edit: it seems I'm just falling behind and the new hotness is https://www.http-arena.com/leaderboard/. Good luck!
My takeaway from this though is that nginx is pretty impressive on its own. Also this stuck out:
It's meant to be an alternative to nginx and Caddy, and the design bet is about configuration. Those servers give you a declarative config language - location blocks, rewrite rules, map directives, try_files - and then, once the declarative language hits its limits, an optional scripting runtime bolted on the side (Lua, or Caddy's plugins). Behavior ends up split across two layers: directives that quietly grow their own control flow, plus scripts that run somewhere in the request lifecycle you have to keep in your head.
I think the bet is misplaced - people prefer configuration over code and long have. The built-ins meet enough peoples needs entirely and they don't need to write C code.
LLM enables a lot of good output if you know what you are doing
The real question is developer commitment and community - the Caddy and Nginx people have worked constantly on supporting their products. It’s going to take a lot of focus and attention.
I think I'd feel more comfortable if I could drop an .rs file into the eBPF dir instead of a .c one. It's already a Rust project! :)
And for some reason I was expecting this to be a kernel-accelerated webserver - if that could be done safely using eBPF that would be amazing!
Also, single-threaded? Forking and sharing an incoming connection queue is basically trivial on Linux, that should be literally just a few lines, even with Rust. Use SO_REUSEPORT and the kernel will do the rest.
FWIW, if you're going to push for io_uring, you should also be pushing kTLS IMO, you'll drastically simplify your design if you can avoid pumping userspace SSL after the handshake.
Will implement forking + SO_REUSEPORT. I've been using nftables for things like this so haven't needed it for myself yet :)
https://redbean.dev
If this piques your interest, make sure to check out the portable C library used to create it, which is also fascinating:
https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
I can accept if stuff is vibe coded and has autogenerated README. But even the announcement blogpost is AI-generated, and I personally have zero data points to see if your understanding of software quality is the same as mine.
It's a weird world, if this would've been announced without any AI disclaimers some years earlier I would've eaten it up without a doubt. But right now if I see a fancy README with several good-looking command line parameters I immediately wonder if the README is hallucinated and the command line parameters actually exist.
Yeah, that is unfortunate. Recently there was this ffmpeg-wasm project. I tested it. It worked. But it was vibe-coded AI. I can't stand AI. Even if things work.
I decided to stay in the oldschool era as much as possible. Clever people publish software. Clever people maintain software. They don't need AI. That's my niche.
We may die out but I still prefer that. (Oh, and only if these clever people write documentation. Many clever people hate writing documentation. I decided a long time ago that if software comes without documentation, it is not worth my time, no matter how great that documentation is. This refers mostly to on-the-application side; I only rarely looked at the Linux documentation, but others stated that it is not too terrible either, so who knows.)
Small static file (174 B) - the bread and butter of static sites:
server req/s p99
zeroserve 36,681 5.4 ms
nginx 31,226 7.8 ms
Caddy 12,830 22 ms
zeroserve serves small files about 17% faster than nginx on a single core, with a tighter tail. HTML pages, small JSON, CSS - this is the case zeroserve is tuned for.
Large static file (100 KB):
server req/s throughput p99
zeroserve 8,000 782 MB/s 22 ms
nginx 7,600 773 MB/s 28 ms
Caddy 6,084 590 MB/s 44 ms
I'd go with a more storied project that's been audited, battle tested, hardened etc than this upstart. There's not enough improvement to justify the risk.
I could totally see "Small static files are the bread and butter of static sites" appearing in some pointless deck on a Zoom call.