Caddy seems to be a new cool HTTP server

amhoab

@mholt how much of a concern are GC pauses? I know Go is getting better, but this is still something I'm really curious about.

In proxy mode, am I right in that Caddy can be an HTTP/2 proxy?

Do you know how performance compares to the other popular servers out there, namely nginx?

I've been looking at https://github.com/tatsuhiro-t/nghttp2 lately, and Caddy appears to be a close competitor.

mholt

@amhoab said:
mholt how much of a concern are GC pauses? I know Go is getting better, but this is still something I'm really curious about.

It's been a while since I've profiled, but if I recall correctly Caddy doesn't make too many allocations per request, so the GC pause is already insignificant for most users. You may notice on super high-load websites, but I haven't heard anyone complain yet. In Go 1.5, GC pauses are effectively going away. That should land in Caddy somewhere around August or September.

In proxy mode, am I right in that Caddy can be an HTTP/2 proxy?

Yes. Let me clarify, the web client will still benefit from HTTP/2 when Caddy is proxying requests, but Caddy does not yet have the ability to act as an HTTP/2 client.

Do you know how performance compares to the other popular servers out there, namely nginx?

More or less. But like all other benchmarks, the tests are somewhat contrived. See near the bottom of the FAQ page: https://caddyserver.com/docs/faq

rm_

mholt said: But like all other benchmarks, the tests are somewhat contrived. See near the bottom of the FAQ page: https://caddyserver.com/docs/faq

Why didn't you compare against Lighttpd??? Didn't like the results?

mholt

@rm_ said:
Why didn't you compare against Lighttpd??? Didn't like the results?

Because nobody asked.

Running 10m test @ http://127.0.0.1:8080
  12 threads and 400 connections
  Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
    Latency    17.79ms    6.49ms 150.49ms   93.53%
    Req/Sec     1.96k   271.46     4.00k    80.21%
  13685232 requests in 10.00m, 10.54GB read
  Socket errors: connect 0, read 356, write 0, timeout 15
Requests/sec:  22808.67
Transfer/sec:     17.99MB

But don't ask me to benchmark any more web servers. I don't believe these comparisons are really that valuable, especially in practice.