Elli is a webserver aimed exclusively at building high-throughput,
low-latency HTTP APIs. If robustness and performance is more important
than a wide feature set, then elli might be for you.
Even though it is very early and Elli still has many rough edges, it is used in production at Wooga.
Feedback and pull requests welcome!
From operating and debugging high-volume, low-latency apps we have gained some valuable insight into what we want from a webserver. We want simplicity, robustness, performance, ease of debugging, visibility into strange client behaviour, really good instrumentation and good tests. We are willing to sacrifice basic features to achieve this.
With this in mind we looked at the big names in the Erlang community:
Yaws, Mochiweb, Misultin and Cowboy. We found Mochiweb to be the best
match and we might eventually end up settling for it. However, we also
wanted to see if we could take the architecture of Mochiweb and
improve on it. elli takes the acceptor-turns-into-request-handler
idea found in Mochiweb, the binaries-only idea from Cowboy and the
request-response idea from WSGI/Rack (with chunked transfer being an
exception).
On top of this we built a handler that allows us to write HTTP middleware modules to add practical features, like compression of responses, access with timings, statistics dashboard and multiple request handlers.
There are a few very mature and robust projects with steady
development, one recently ceased development and one new kid on the
block with lots of interest. As elli is not a general purpose
webserver, but more of a specialized tool, we believe it has a very
different target audience and would not attract effort or users away
from the big names.
"Hello World!" micro-benchmarks are really useful when measuring the
performance, but the numbers usually do more harm than good when
released. For this reason I include an ApacheBench script
(bin/ab.sh) and encourage you to run the benchmarks on your own.
$: ./rebar get-deps
$: ./rebar compile
$: erl -pa ebin
% starting elli
1>: {ok, Pid} = elli:start_link([{callback, elli_example_callback}, {port, 3000}]).
% stopping elli
2>: elli:stop(Pid).
see src/elli_example_callback.erl
- Add proper
Dateheader as clients use this for computing cache expirations - "Media" middleware for serving up static files from disk under a certain path
- Sendfile
- Access log: https://github.com/knutin/elli/blob/master/src/elli_access_log.erl
- Real-time statistics dashboard: https://github.com/knutin/elli_stats
- Basic auth: https://github.com/martinrehfeld/elli_basicauth