Sepherosa Ziehau has been working on network performance, including making more network calls asynchronous. His test case using nginx shows that a single DragonFly machine can now take enough traffic to max out 2 10Gb links. That’s with 16Kb requests, and 30,000 of them at the same time.
A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
This is really interesting. Could we see similar work for for Apache? It too has had a number of performance improvements over the years.
I think Sephe does this with nginx because nginx is what he’s using. I don’t know if the same strategies can even apply to apache.
I would think nginx is better at serving static stuff fast.
Also I don’t think apache has this fsend(?)-thing, where
a process can tell the kernel to read a file into a network
socket.