Published at LXer:

A Web server needs to support concurrency. The server should service clients in a timely, fair manner to ensure that no client starves because some other client causes the server to hang. Multiprocessing and multithreading, and hybrids of these, are traditional ways to achieve concurrency. Node.js represents another way, one based on system libraries for asynchronous I/O, such as epoll (Linux) and kqueue (FreeBSD). To highlight the trade-offs among the approaches, I have three echo servers written in close-to-the-metal C: a forking_server, a threading_server and a polling_server.

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