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 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.
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 :)
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 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 like the idea.
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.
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 :)
Given the benchmarks:
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.