lighty's life

lighty developer blog

Voy a Buenos Aires

… with only a few words of Spanish learnt so far I’ll be on my way to Buenos Aires on Dec 30th, celebrating New Years Eve their with some friends.

If you want to get patches into trunk/ ping darix or jakabosky on IRC. They can will decide if the patch can go in or has to wait for me.

If you would like to get a session on lighty or just want to meet me and invite me to a asado somewhere in Argentina between Dec 31st and Jan 20th drop me a mail at jan.kneschke@gmail.com. :)

Can someone tell me if the topic was correct Spanish ?

1.5.0 Goes Cmake

It is a tradition now to change the build-system from lighttpd on each major release
For now we have the autotools as the user-visible build-system and scons as the system for the developers.

Currently we are testing cmake as a replacement for the scons part.

Faster Web 2.0

In Faster FastCGI I talked about using temp-files in /dev/shm to reduce the overhead of large FastCGI requests. Robert implemented it right away and it is available in the latest pre-release

Woken up far too early and having the first coffee I shared some ideas on how this could be useful to accelerate AJAX based applications.

1.5.0 Works on Win32 Natively - Again

Half a year ago I was traveling a bit and tried to get lighty to compile natively on win32

Some time has passed and I concentrated on the other stuff in the 1.5.0 tree, leaving the nasty win32 code in place for someone to pick up. Ben Harper aka rogojin has picked it up and released a win32 installer for the latest pre-release

A simple tests shows that staticfiles are working nicely and that http-proxying with mod-proxy-core works too. Nice work, Ben.

PRE-RELEASE: lighttpd-1.5.0-r1477.tar.gz

mod-proxy-core

Robert Jakabosky fixed and improved mod-proxy-core alot since the last pre-release:

POSIX Async IO

I added native support for POSIX AIO which might bring async io for more platforms. While Linux AIO is pretty stable the POSIX aio support is pretty experimental. Perhaps it compiles for you.

I tried to compile it on Linux and FreeBSD.

server.network-backend = "posix-aio"

Try it

Check if it compiles and works for you.

www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.5.0-r1477.tar.gz

Faster FastCGI

While I was throwing away from bogus data-copy operations from the mod-proxy-core code I stumbled over a simple question:

Why do we copy the HTTP response data from the backends at all ?

We are just forwarding them in most cases without touching them.

COMET Meets Mod_mailbox

Some time ago we got a request on how to implement COMET with lighttpd. I responded with a idea about a mod_multiplex which would allow the let the client open a COMET-channel and give the backend the possibility to feed multiple channels at once with the client to poll for new data.

Basicly it would separate the HTTP Request-Response cycle from the underlying connection. HTTP would be used to open the connection and reopen it in case it went away, but otherwise it would be just a data-channel for your JavaScript/AJAX content we want to send to the client when WE (the content-provider) want.