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82 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
82 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1236
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Title: HPR1236: Lament For httpd
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1236/hpr1236.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:02:44
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---
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Hey, it's DeepGeek, so I'm kind of shook up over changing web servers.
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For the longest time me and the partner in a web server co-op were using THTTPD as
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a web server, and the time came to move on, hopefully by now, you're asking yourselves,
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so what's the big deal?
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That's why I hope to explain to you why I should be emotional about, well, changing
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a tool.
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To do that though, I will first have to explain a few things.
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First will be, what is the attraction to THTTPD?
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Well, THTTPD is a web server with a cult following.
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It was originally written in the 90s to beat out Apache by being a non-forking server.
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It actually did this with some surprising results, as was written to handle 100,000 simultaneous
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connections, something you could do with Apache, but you would have to do it with a much
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more beefy machine than THTTPD would need.
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But if you remember the 90s, web pages were different, CGI was newborn, PHP and the
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lamp stack were not accessible to every non-professional.
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Most non-professionals were using flat HTML and doing that usually on a slash tilde account
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at a regional ISP, you know, without having individual domain names.
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The THTTPD code base was quite small, yet it supported a certain base of functions
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that was highly desirable.
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It ran in a few megabytes of memory, but it used memory mapping for files that served,
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so it would serve a file and that file remained in memory for a while if the web page was
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popular that file would be served to the next comma from memory, and in that day that
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could be a time saver.
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So it was small and it was fast, but it was also evolved for T1 lines, so it supports
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throttling, so you could give it a speed limit to certain files and set resource usage
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that way.
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Lastly, all it sounds could be set in either command line switches or in a small config
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file.
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It truly did one thing, served web pages, and it served them well, and instance would
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also run month after month without fault.
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However, the advent of PHP and MySQL backends really did not work out for this tiny server,
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and when they began to become dominant, he quietly announced, in an email list, it's
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deprecation.
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It was obsolete, yet still its reputation was set.
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People kept using it, it was small, cool, efficient, a real demon with flat files.
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It was bizarrely easy to configure, also, so that it could be used for months on a server,
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as well as a quick program you could run on a command line to make a quick HTTP file
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transfer over a home network.
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But technologies, inexorable March, can do nasty things to un-maintained programs, no
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matter how robust, THTPD went from being a top 10 web server demon to being a specially
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demon used to assist large websites for stack content, in other words, it kept its superiority
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over a patchy for things like JPEG, GIF, and MP3 files.
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So smart webmasters with big modern demands would create lamp stack webpages, but all
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the images would be served by an instance of THTPD, less letting a patchy do what it
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did best, and letting THTPD do what it did best.
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Eventually, THTPD did an amazing Deadman walking routine.
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I used it for years after the original Maintainer Stop development, and I used it for years,
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and it sent my podcast forward-wide all over the planet, yet I shed a tear, let me give
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you some perspective.
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I recently read a blog entry, its point was something like, remember the 90s when everybody
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was a web designer, what a bunch of amateurs, well, that's not how I remember the 90s,
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I remember the 90s more like this, remember the 90s when we built the medium for you
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bitches that didn't require you to go through big ass corporations in order to communicate
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worldwide without being gouged by some greedy douchebags, that's how I remember the 90s.
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THTPD to me is the end of an error when one man could write a production class web server.
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To make a competitive server now, you have to use a whole bunch of libraries written
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by others, it's a matter of ending an error of independence on a frontier to me.
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Most people on the web don't care about independence, building sub pages for Facebook or something,
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for them to advertise to your friends and surveil you and your friends, nice present,
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the amateurs did it better, fuck being slick, I'll take freedom in privacy and a feast
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of friends online any day of the week.
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You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does our, we are
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a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
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it really is.
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club.
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