> [Althttpd ...] has run the https://sqlite.org/ website since 2004

I don't know what the landscape was like in 2004 really, but probably at least an order of magnitude less than today's bazillion (whatever that would be!).

I don't think Nginx was out then, so I was using Apache HTTPD. Maybe Dwayne considered that too heavy for what he needed to serve up.

Nginx was first released to the public in 2004 [1]. Apache was released in 1995 [2].

On a more personal note, wow! I had no idea I started using the Internet for realz before the release of Apache, in 1994. This young made me feel, not.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server

Nginx’s first public release was Oct 2004, so fits with your theory.

I don't know of any other well-known web server with the same featureset. For instance, it has no configuration file, it's run from xinetd statelessly/single-threaded, it runs itself in a chroot and it's short enough to be readable without specific effort.

It also isn't brand new: it's been around since 2004. So that probably narrows the range of possible competitors even more.

If you can find a webserver that meets all of those constraints, please let us know.

filed [0] is written to be readable, and stateless, and runs from a chroot, and has no configuration file. It doesn't run from xinetd and it's multi-threaded, though.

I wrote it because no other web server could serve files fast enough on my system (not lighttpd, not nginx, not Apache httpd, not thttpd) to keep movies from buffering.

[0] https://filed.rkeene.org/

> I wrote it because no other web server could serve files fast enough on my system (not lighttpd, not nginx, not Apache httpd, not thttpd) to keep movies from buffering.

Could you expand on that? What type of files, how many clients? I seem to recall plain apache2 from spinning rust streaming fine to vlc over lan - but last time I did that was before HD was much of a thing... Now I seem to stream 4k hdr over ZeroTierOne over the Internet to my Nvidia Shield via just DLNA/UpNP (still to vlc) just fine. But I'm considering moving to caddy and/or http/webdav - as a reasonable web server with support for range request seem to handle skipping in the stream much better.

You might want to try filed !

This was for serving MPEG4-TS files with, IIRC, H.264 video and MPEG-III audio streams -- nothing fancy -- from a server running a container living on a disk attached via USB/1.1.

While USB/1.1 has enough bandwidth to stream the video, the other HTTP servers were too slow with Range requests, because they would do things like wait for logs to complete and open the file to serve (which is synchronous and requires walking the slow disk tree).

> a server running a container living on a disk attached via USB/1.1.

Ah, ok. That makes sense. USB 1.1 can certainly challenge cache layers and software assumptions.

I do wonder how far apache2 might have been pushed, dropping logs and adjusting proxy/cache settings.

I do not know, though I do know that just disabling logging wasn't sufficient.

You missed the date in the comment of the C file: 2001-09-15

Back then, there weren't bazillion web servers out there. A patchy server was still.. patchy. And engine that solves problem X (c10k) was not created yet :)

(for whoever reads my comment, I am referring to Apache and nginx)

dependency awareness. External stuff bears surprises. Not everybody feels comfortable with that.

There’s plenty of lightweight minimal web servers with minimal dependencies.

But hang on is dependency anxiety really the reason or did you just make that up?

no, not made up – selfmade is even less dependencies than a 3rd party without other deps. And minimalis more than zero, still.

>There’s plenty of lightweight minimal web servers with minimal dependencies.

In 2001?

Simplicity