Microhttp is a fast, scalable, event-driven, self-contained Java web server that is small enough for a programmer to understand and reason about.
Comprehensibility is the highest priority. This library is intended to be an alternative to commonly used frameworks with overwhelming complexity. Implementation decisions aim to strike a balance between simplicity and efficiency.
Microhttp discretizes all requests and responses. Streaming is not supported. This aligns well with transactional web services that exchange small payloads. Limiting request body size has the added benefit of overflow protection. This is frequently overlooked in web services that consume request bodies in a stream-oriented fashion.
TLS is not supported. Edge proxies and load balancers provide this capability. The last hop to Microhttp typically does not require TLS.
HTTP 2 is not supported for a similar reason. Edge proxies can support HTTP 2 while using HTTP 1.1 on the last hop to Microhttp.
Principles:
- No dependencies
- Small, targeted codebase (~500 LOC)
- Highly concurrent
- Single threaded
- Event-driven non-blocking NIO
- No TLS support
- No streaming support
- Traceability via log events
Includes:
- HTTP 1.0 and 1.1
- Chunked transfer encoding
- Persistent connections
- Pipelining
Excludes:
- HTTP 2
- Range requests
- Caching
- Compression
Microhttp is available in the Maven Central repository with group org.microhttp
and artifact microhttp.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.microhttp</groupId>
<artifactId>microhttp</artifactId>
<version>0.1</version>
</dependency>The snippet below represents a minimal starting point. Default options and debug logging.
The application consists of an event loop running in the main thread. There are no additional application threads.
Responses are handled immediately in the Handler.handle method.
Response response = new Response(
200,
"OK",
List.of(new Header("Content-Type", "text/plain")),
"hello world\n".getBytes());
Handler handler = (req, callback) -> callback.accept(response);
EventLoop eventLoop = new EventLoop(handler);
eventLoop.start();The following example demonstrates the full range of configuration options.
Response response = new Response(
200,
"OK",
List.of(new Header("Content-Type", "text/plain")),
"hello world\n".getBytes());
Options options = new Options()
.withHost("localhost")
.withPort(8080)
.withSocketTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(60))
.withResolution(Duration.ofMillis(100))
.withReadBufferSize(1_024 * 64)
.withMaxRequestSize(1_024 * 1_024)
.withAcceptLength(0);
Logger logger = new DebugLogger();
Handler handler = (req, callback) -> callback.accept(response);
EventLoop eventLoop = new EventLoop(options, logger, handler);
eventLoop.start();The example below demonstrates asynchronous request handling.
Responses are handled in a separate background thread after an artificial one-second delay.
Response response = new Response(
200,
"OK",
List.of(new Header("Content-Type", "text/plain")),
"hello world\n".getBytes());
ScheduledExecutorService executorService = Executors.newSingleThreadScheduledExecutor();
Handler handler = (req, callback) -> executorService.schedule(() -> callback.accept(response), 1, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
EventLoop eventLoop = new EventLoop(handler);
eventLoop.start();This example demonstrates the use of a separate thread for the event loop.
Response response = new Response(
200,
"OK",
List.of(new Header("Content-Type", "text/plain")),
"hello world\n".getBytes());
ScheduledExecutorService executorService = Executors.newSingleThreadScheduledExecutor();
Handler handler = (req, callback) -> executorService.schedule(() -> callback.accept(response), 1, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
EventLoop eventLoop = new EventLoop(handler);
Thread thread = new Thread(eventLoop::start);
thread.start();
// ...
eventLoop.stop();
thread.join();The experiments detailed below were conducted on a pair of EC2 instances in AWS, one running the server and another running the client.
- Region:
us-west-2 - Instance type:
c5.2xlargecompute optimized instance 8 vCPU and 16 GB of memory - OS: Amazon Linux 2 with Linux Kernel 5.10, AMI
ami-00f7e5c52c0f43726 - OpenJDK 17.0.2 from https://jdk.java.net/17/
In order to facilitate the rapid creation of 50,000 connections, the following sysctl kernel parameter changes
were committed on both hosts prior to the start of the experiment:
sysctl net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range="2000 64000"
sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout=30
sysctl net.core.somaxconn=8192
sysctl net.core.netdev_max_backlog=8000
sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog=8192
The goal of throughput benchmarks is to gauge the maximum request-per-second rate that can be supported by Microhttp. These experiments are intended to surface the costs and limitations of Microhttp alone. They are not intended to provide a real world estimate of throughput in an integrated system with many components and dependencies.
ThroughputServer.java was used for throughput tests.
It simply returns "hello world" in a tiny, plain-text response to every request. Requests are handled in the context of
the main application thread, directly within the Handler.handle method.
The first throughput test was conducted with Apache Bench.
A throughput of 100,000 requests per second was easily reproducible.
[ec2-user@ip-10-39-196-99 ~]$ ab -k -c 100 -n 1000000 http://10.39.196.164:8080/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1879490 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking 10.39.196.164 (be patient)
Completed 100000 requests
Completed 200000 requests
Completed 300000 requests
Completed 400000 requests
Completed 500000 requests
Completed 600000 requests
Completed 700000 requests
Completed 800000 requests
Completed 900000 requests
Completed 1000000 requests
Finished 1000000 requests
Server Software:
Server Hostname: 10.39.196.164
Server Port: 8080
Document Path: /
Document Length: 12 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 9.964 seconds
Complete requests: 1000000
Failed requests: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 1000000
Total transferred: 101000000 bytes
HTML transferred: 12000000 bytes
Requests per second: 100364.03 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 0.996 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.010 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 9899.19 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 1
Processing: 1 1 0.0 1 3
Waiting: 0 1 0.0 1 3
Total: 1 1 0.0 1 3
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1
66% 1
75% 1
80% 1
90% 1
95% 1
98% 1
99% 1
100% 3 (longest request)
A second throughput client, Client.java, was implemented with Java NIO and tailored specifically for Microhttp throughput testing.
Again, 100,000+ requests per second was readily available.
[ec2-user@ip-10-39-196-99 ~]$ ./jdk-17.0.2/bin/java -cp microhttp-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar test.Client 10.39.196.164 8080 100 30000
Args[host=10.39.196.164, port=8080, numConnections=100, duration=30000]
barrier opened!
duration: 30001 ms, messages: 3250567, throughput: 108348.621713 msg/sec
The goal of concurrency benchmarks is to gauge the number of concurrent connections and clients that can be supported by Microhttp.
ConcurrencyServer.java was used for concurrency tests.
"hello world" responses are handled in a separate background thread after an injected one-second delay. The one-second delay dramatically reduces the resource footprint since requests and responses aren't speeding over each connection continuously. This leaves room to scale up connections, which is the metric of interest.
Apache Bench only supports a maximum of 20,000 concurrency connections.
Microhttp holds up well.
[ec2-user@ip-10-39-196-99 ~]$ ab -k -c 20000 -n 100000 http://10.39.196.164:8080/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1879490 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking 10.39.196.164 (be patient)
Completed 10000 requests
Completed 20000 requests
Completed 30000 requests
Completed 40000 requests
Completed 50000 requests
Completed 60000 requests
Completed 70000 requests
Completed 80000 requests
Completed 90000 requests
Completed 100000 requests
Finished 100000 requests
Server Software:
Server Hostname: 10.39.196.164
Server Port: 8080
Document Path: /
Document Length: 12 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20000
Time taken for tests: 6.825 seconds
Complete requests: 100000
Failed requests: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 100000
Total transferred: 10100000 bytes
HTML transferred: 1200000 bytes
Requests per second: 14652.72 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1364.934 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.068 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1445.24 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 42 84.6 0 266
Processing: 1000 1048 54.2 1013 1256
Waiting: 1000 1048 54.2 1013 1174
Total: 1000 1090 117.3 1022 1349
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1022
66% 1091
75% 1137
80% 1256
90% 1313
95% 1322
98% 1328
99% 1332
100% 1349 (longest request)
A concurrency level of 50,000 connections was achievable using Client.java.
[ec2-user@ip-10-39-196-99 ~]$ ./jdk-17.0.2/bin/java -cp microhttp-0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar test.Client 10.39.196.164 8080 50000 60000
Args[host=10.39.196.164, port=8080, numConnections=50000, duration=60000]
barrier opened!
duration: 61001 ms, messages: 2968864, throughput: 48669.103785 msg/sec
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