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An Overview of the Boa Web Server

Posted by Hemos on from the smal-pretty-small dept.

Gentu writes "There is a pretty new and little known, lite web server in town, named Boa. The server can run very fast on older machines, even on embedded devices, but it is only CGI-based. OSNews introduces Boa (running under Linux) and it includes some preliminary benchmarks against Apache and thttpd."

18 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty new? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pretty new? You what? I've been running it for five years. Even the OSNews article mentions that "Boa was written sometime in the early 1990's by Paul Philips". It is definitely a nice little server tho'.

    1. Re:Pretty new? by beebware · · Score: 2, Informative

      Plus the fact it's been used in Axis web cameras for many years now (a camera with an embedded webserver, modem connection and network connection).

  2. uh by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is a pretty new and little known

    You'd think the submitter would at least read the article. It says right in there that it's been in development since before 1995, "In fact Boa is one of the oldest web servers in constant development".

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  3. there are lots of options by night_flyer · · Score: 3, Informative

    even on the windows side, there is sambar server, tiny server (which is very small and very fast), and a multitude of others, some are feature rich, others just push out plain web pages.

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  4. fnord! by MisterP · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're interested in small webservers, fnord is another one. It even does CGI, vhosts and directory listings and it's only 18K. It requires tcpserver though.

    1. Re:fnord! by the_danielsan · · Score: 3, Informative

      URL should be http://www.fefe.de/fnord/

      (trailing slash)

  5. I'm unimpressed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I submited this one some weeks ago but it didn't make it to the frontpage. It's a new http server, written 100% in PHP, somebody ever tried it ?

  6. Let me put in a plug for bozohttpd by revision1_1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...available here. I've had it running on a 386 with only 4MB RAM running the NetBSD "tiny" distribution.

    Small footprint, pretty functional: HTTP, CGI, etc. It's referenced in the BOA docs.

  7. Re:performance info is useless by shinyshinyspurs · · Score: 2, Informative

    As far as I know, Boa is used in embedded linux platforms...like Axis webcams, etc. I used it about three or four years ago in webcams. It provided a low-overhead means by which a browser-based configuration tool could be delivered. I think it worked great. The features are not the point. In fact, the absence of features seems to be the point.

  8. Re:Anything in between by MORTAR_COMBAT! · · Score: 3, Informative

    You might try thttpd from ACME Labs. I've used it (also Boa) on several 486 and early pentium machines.

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    MORTAR COMBAT!
  9. rws by Richard+W.M.+Jones · · Score: 2, Informative
    Or rws which let's you use C to write CGI scripts that are loaded into the server at run time (for extreme speed), and has database access, and hence is much more useful for dynamic webpages.

    Rich.

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  10. Re:This comes down to.. by Richard+W.M.+Jones · · Score: 2, Informative
    But today, when 90% of the stuff served (besides images) by web servers are dynamic content, why does a web server like this get a headline?

    <plug>

    Very true. That's why you need a web server like rws which is tiny, and loads C-based CGIs into memory, and has a full database layer.

    </plug>

    Rich.
    --
    libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
  11. slashdot effect and Boa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Several posters have commented derisively on www.boa.org's inability to take the load of a slashdot effect. These comments miss the mark totally.

    www.boa.org is hosted at no charge by Russ Nelson. I don't thank him often enough for this help. He provides similar service for selected other community projects, too, check out http://www.russnelson.com/ .

    I also don't hold it against Russ that he doesn't use Boa for his web server. He has other things on his mind than learning about one more piece of software; he used Apache before he hosted Boa, and he continues to use Apache. It does the job for him. If the site acts slashdotted, knowing Russ, I suspect his pipe is clogged, and there's not much he can do about that.

    So if y'all want to slashdot a Boa server to see if it holds up, pick something other than www.boa.org. There are plenty to choose from, including some that wouldn't even notice the slashdot effect.

  12. Where do people get stuff like this? by jefp · · Score: 5, Informative

    >There is a pretty new

    It's not new. As the linked article says, it's been around since 1995, so it's almost as old as the web.

    >and little known

    I link to it from the thttpd page, which gets a quarter million hits per month, so I guess I've done my part to make Boa better known.

    >it is only CGI-based.

    I don't even know what this means. It serves files using select() and non-blocking I/O, not CGI. It implements CGI for external programs. Perhaps the author meant that CGI was the only option for external programs.

    >preliminary benchmarks against Apache and thttpd

    As others mentioned, no, there are no Apache or thttpd benchmarks in the article. No doubt it's much faster than Apache and about as fast as thttpd, but experience shows that very few people care about web server speed.

    >Boa (running under Linux)

    I keep telling people that if they are one of the few who care about performance enough to run a specialized NBIO web server like thttpd or Boa or mathopd, they shouldn't throw away half their performance by running Linux. Use FreeBSD.

  13. Hydra: a Boa based web server by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    A very nice and fast web server is Hydra
    [ http://hydra.hellug.gr ] . It is based on boa.

    Here is some info from the site

    Hydra is a high performance multi threaded HTTP web server. Unlike traditional multi threaded web
    servers, Hydra uses a constant, but configurable, pool of threads, and each thread can handle several
    connections by multiplexing the connections. This may remind you a non blocking server, and this is
    true, but Hydra has not the killing limitation of a non blocking server, which is that they cannot use
    more than one CPU. Hydra will take advantage of every available CPU in a system.

    It supports many thingsa that boa doesnt, like

    virtual hosts
    cgi 1.1
    SSL 3.0/TLS 1.0
    PHP and other scripting languages.

    1. Re:Hydra: a Boa based web server by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Actually, you are wrong 50% of the time.

      Boa *does* support CGI/1.1 (and has since the first release), and ip-based virtualhosts since one of the early 0.92 releases. Also, more recent versions support name-based virtualhosting.

      This is not to denigrate the Hydra project, BTW, but get your facts right.

  14. Web Server Survey - October 2002 by gbitten · · Score: 5, Informative

    Statistics from Netcraft:

    WebServer Sites
    Apache 21258824
    Microsoft-IIS 10143822
    Zeus 711957
    unknown 496657
    Netscape-Enterprise 465337
    Rapidsite 411267
    thttpd 322974
    .
    .
    .
    .
    Boa 463

  15. Boa is used for camera appliances.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Boa is used in the Axis camera product line. Its also used in the Canon VBCam pan-tilt-zoom controllable camera.