Skip to main content

Project: HTTP Server

Build a production-grade HTTP server that handles thousands of concurrent connections. You will implement the HTTP protocol, connection management, and high-performance I/O. This project teaches you the architecture behind nginx, HAProxy, and every modern high-performance network server. The key insight: you cannot create one thread per connection (10,000 connections means 10,000 threads, each consuming ~8MB of stack space = 80GB of virtual memory). Instead, you use an event loop with epoll — a single thread monitors thousands of sockets simultaneously and only processes the ones that have data ready. This is how nginx handles millions of connections on a single server.

Architecture

1

Event Loop

epoll-based I/O multiplexing
2

Connection Pool

Pre-allocated connection objects
3

HTTP Parser

RFC-compliant request parsing
4

Request Router

URL routing and handlers

Core Structures


Event Loop with epoll


HTTP Parser


Response Builder


Request Router


Example Usage


Makefile


Benchmarking


Extensions

HTTPS/TLS

Add SSL/TLS with OpenSSL

HTTP/2

Implement HTTP/2 protocol

WebSockets

Add WebSocket support

Reverse Proxy

Load balancing and proxying

Rate Limiting

Token bucket rate limiting

Caching

Response caching layer

Next Up

Performance Optimization

Learn advanced performance tuning techniques