talawahtech

Correct, it is a fake HTTP server, serving a real HTTP workload. This post is about comparing two different networking stacks (kernel vs DPDK) to see how they handle a specific (and extreme) HTTP workload. From the perspective of the networking stack, the networking hardware, and the AWS networking fabric between instances, these are real HTTP requests and responses.

> I'd really love to see this adapted to do actual webserver work and see what the difference is.

Take a look at my previous article[1]. It is still an extreme/synthetic benchmark, but libreactor was able to hit 1.2M req/s while fully parsing the HTTP requests using picohttpparser[3].

From what I recall, when I played with disabling HTTP parsing in libreactor, the performance improvement was only about 5%.

Skipping the parsing of the HTTP requests definitely gives a performance boost, but for this comparison both sides got the same boost, so I didn't mind being less strict. Seastar's HTTP parser was being finicky, so I chose the easy route and just removed it from the equation.

For reference though, in my previous post[2] libreactor was able to hit 1.2M req/s while fully parsing the HTTP requests using picohttpparser[3]. But that is still a very simple and highly optimized implementation. FYI, from what I recall, when I played with disabling HTTP parsing in libreactor, I got a performance boost of about 5%.