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Small, fast, modern HTTP server for Erlang/OTP.
cowboyerlangfunctionalhigh-performancehttphttp-serverhttp2http2-serverhttpsproduction-readyrestwebweb-frameworkwebsocketwebsocket-serverwebsockets
49be0f57cf
Cowboy will set the socket's buffer size dynamically to better fit the current workload. When the incoming data is small, a low buffer size reduces the memory footprint and improves responsiveness and therefore performance. When the incoming data is large, such as large HTTP request bodies, a larger buffer size helps us avoid doing too many binary appends and related allocations. Setting a large buffer size for all use cases is sub-optimal because allocating more than needed necessarily results in a performance hit (not just increased memory usage). By default Cowboy starts with a buffer size of 8192 bytes. It then doubles or halves the buffer size depending on the size of the data it receives from the socket. It stops decreasing at 8192 and increasing at 131072 by default. To keep track of the size of the incoming data Cowboy maintains a moving average. It allows Cowboy to avoid changing the buffer too often but still react quickly when necessary. Cowboy will increase the buffer size when the moving average is above 90% of the current buffer size, and decrease when the moving average is below 40% of the current buffer size. The current buffer size and moving average are propagated when switching protocols. The dynamic buffer is implemented in HTTP/1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/1 Websocket. HTTP/2 Websocket has it disabled because it doesn't interact directly with the socket; in that case it is HTTP/2 that has a dynamic buffer. The dynamic buffer provides a very large performance improvement in many scenarios, at minimal cost for others. Because it largely depend on the underlying protocol the improvements are no all equal. TLS and compression also impact the results. The improvement when reading a large request body, with the requests repeated in a fast loop are: * HTTP: 6x to 20x faster * HTTPS: 2x to 6x faster * H2: 4x to 5x faster * H2C: 20x to 40x faster I am not sure why H2C's performance was so bad, especially compared to H2, when using default buffer sizes. Dynamic buffers make H2C a lot more viable with default settings. The performance impact on "hello world" type requests is minimal, it goes from -5% to +5% roughly. Websocket improvements vary again depending on the protocol, but also depending on whether compression is enabled: * HTTP echo: roughly 2x faster * HTTP send: roughly 4x faster * H2C echo: roughly 2x faster * H2C send: 3x to 4x faster In the echo test we reply back, and Gun doesn't have the dynamic buffer optimisation, so that probably explains the x2 difference. With compression however there isn't much improvement. The results are roughly within -10% to +10% of each other. Zlib compression seems to be a bottleneck, or at least to modify the performance profile to such an extent that the size of the buffer does not matter. This happens to randomly generated binary data as well so it is probably not caused by the test data. |
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= Cowboy Cowboy is a small, fast and modern HTTP server for Erlang/OTP. == Goals Cowboy aims to provide a *complete* HTTP stack in a *small* code base. It is optimized for *low latency* and *low memory usage*, in part because it uses *binary strings*. Cowboy provides *routing* capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang. Because it uses Ranch for managing connections, Cowboy can easily be *embedded* in any other application. Cowboy is *clean* and *well tested* Erlang code. == Online documentation * https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.12/guide[User guide] * https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.12/manual[Function reference] == Offline documentation * While still online, run `make docs` * User guide available in `doc/` in PDF and HTML formats * Function reference man pages available in `doc/man3/` and `doc/man7/` * Run `make install-docs` to install man pages on your system * Full documentation in Asciidoc available in `doc/src/` * Examples available in `examples/` == Getting help * https://discord.gg/x25nNq2fFE[Discord server] * https://github.com/ninenines/cowboy/issues[Issues tracker] * https://ninenines.eu/services[Commercial Support] * https://github.com/sponsors/essen[Sponsor me!]