Multicore support for lophttpd

lophttpd (in version 0.86), which is my private research
project for high performance web servers, now comes
with support for multiple cores (Linux only for now).
Unless specified otherwise, one thread per CPU core sleeps
in a accept() loop. Increasing load of the cores will then
result in more and more connections passed to the accept()
sleeping on yet unused cores.
This works since the kernel wakeup's all threads sleeping
in the accept() but only one will actually get the
connection (all others get EAGAIN).
In OS engineering this is known as the thundering herd problem
if you have thousands of processes woken up at once.
However this does not apply here since the number of cores
is small compared to what would "thunder a herd".
So basically we take the good parts of that "problem" but do not
run into the problem itself.


If it turns out to work well, I will also add multicore
support to sshttp. And it is by far more fun to code it
than the OS classes at university discovering scheduling theoretically.

Death of a great mathematican

I just read that the great Mathematican Benoît Mandelbrot
died on Oct 14th.
His Mandelbrot-set fractales were one reason for me to start programming back in the days. Beside its beauty its likely
that all your mobile internet wont work without fractales
since (almost all?) antennas inside small wifi/GSM/UMTS
are self-similar to have maximum gain/space ratio. A lot of other technical and scientific
equipment would be NULL without that too, and I bet the
distribution signature of self replicating code also has to
be self-similar if it wants to be optimal. :-)

New sshttp available

I switched the I/O engine inside sshttpd from blocking to
non-blocking sockets. Blocking I/O is by far easier,
but disappearing IPs could hang all other connections.
This should be fixed now.
Non-blocking socket state engines are really worth
a PhD thesis. :-)
Anything else is as before, just setup nf-setup
and run sshttpd.
Available for download here.

Hiding a sshd inside a httpd trickery

If you always asked yourself how you could run both a sshd and
an apache (or a lophttpd!) on the same TCP port 80
without patching any client or server software and still
getting always the right service, you should
have a look at sshttp.