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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."

2 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Still slower than ZWS by fastlink · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hi
    According to my tests BOA beats Apache.
    BUT the ZEUS web server (www.zeus.com) which is 'feature complete' (including mod_perl in version 4.2) still beats both of them.
    Have a nice day!

  2. Excellent for special UID use. by nutcracka · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've used Boa in a number of cases where certain groups of CGI scripts need to run as a specific UID and I didn't want to use the SUID functionality of Apache. Because it is so lightweight, having a few of these hanging around for various citical system UIDs can really be handy, esp. if you have an aversion to using SUID wrappers and such. A good example is using Boa running as the same UID as the mailing list processor so you can have web administration of the list rosters. And the users don't even know about it because I use the ProxyPass directive to shuttle the requests from the standard port 80 up to the port on which Boa is running, so my logging is still centralized/standardized through Apache.

    Boa is very cool. Kudos to the developers!