Assange Webserver - Summary

This group is not part of the GNU Project.

Assange Webserver is a webserver for sysadmins that are having a bad day.  Assange is designed to perform nicely under extremely high loads.  Security is also a high priority.

Use cases for Assange include DDoS attacks, and high traffic websites hosted on a small amount of hardware.

Assange achieves high performance and high security by:

• not being 100% standards compliant
• loading all files it will serve into memory on startup
• not supporting dynamic resources (e.g. PHP, Python, Perl, A$P, A$P.NET)
• allocating almost all required memory on startup
• precalculating most HTTP headers
• using a single thread
• using a connection-switching algorithm that runs in O(1) time

In a normal environment, many of these "features" are not good; HTTP compliance is usually important, using memory as needed is good, dynamic content is often essential, etc.  Therefore, Assange should generally not be used in a normal environment.  Assange might be viewed as the program to use when the alternative is no website at all.

For example, lets say that example-activist-website.org is put under extreme pressure by means of a DDoS.  The operators of this website might decide to switch from their Drupal website to a simple one run by Assange, until the attack is over.  The website served by Assange could be an informational website, or perhaps a quick message alerting their users of the problem they are encountering.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Currently, Assange Webserver is in its early stages of development.  While the maintainers would appreciate any testing and feedback, Assange is not currently suggested for use in "real world" applications.

Registration Date: Tue 01 Feb 2011 01:21:45 AM UTC
License: GNU General Public License v3 or later
Development Status: 2 - Pre-Alpha