Clker.com – weblog

I’ve been seriously considering writing my own webserver instead of running apache. Although apache is very good, yet, sometimes I feel things will be much funner if write this website even in C. My reasoning is although PHP is fast and APC provides a further boost, yet at one point I will have to cluster a set of machines and proxy the requests because of various tweeks that need to get done in every piece of software.

So, I started considering seriously how to write a webserver that is optimized for high requests and can make better use of memory, and how to resolve the biggest problem in C, which is crashes due to memory allocation and writing outside arrays without slowing down the C speed even a bit.

I ended up writing a small library does that memory stuff, and a small webserver and I’ve been playing with them for a while and without a surprise, I found that I can serve more than 1000 pages a second very easy without attempting to optimize dealing with strings and just with basic STL string, which in my opinion is very slow.

What I still need to do is to support the CGI stuff, so I can execute the current PHP code and run it beside the C and that will give me more time to port the website pages in phases without stopping the website, or delaying running this server.

I just updated the website with a set of features that I’ve been working on for a while. Now, every user has a wall, which appears on his/her profile. Others can leave messages on any wall. The simplest type of message is a comment on a picture, which will appear under the clipart picture and will appear on the user’s wall who wrote the comment.

If another user replied to the comment, the reply will appear on the clipart’s page, on the user’s wall who wrote the original comment, and on the user who commented.

Any user can also leave any one else a message directly on his/her wall, without being a comment on any clipart.

Similarly, any user can file a bug or feature request, which will appear on his wall and will also appear on the bug report feature request page that can be accessed by a link in the footer.

I hope that the bug report and feature request page will make communication with me easier than before.