Welcome to my High-Performance Custom HTTP Server project!
This is a minimal HTTP/1.1 server built from scratch in C++ to explore low-level networking, concurrency, and protocol design — inspired by the kind of ultra-fast servers used in High-Frequency Trading (HFT) and performance-critical systems.
This project is a hands-on journey to build a lightweight, efficient HTTP server with:
- Manual socket programming for accepting and handling TCP connections.
- Basic HTTP/1.1 protocol parsing supporting GET and POST methods.
- Static file serving for assets like HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc.
- Custom routing with dynamic endpoints using a simple router abstraction.
- Multithreading with a thread pool for concurrent client handling.
- MIME type detection based on file extensions.
- TCP socket server listening on a user-specified port.
- Parsing of incoming HTTP requests (method, path, headers, body).
- Serving static files under
/static/path, with content-type detection. - Basic routing with dynamic handler functions for custom endpoints (e.g.,
/hello,/status,/echo). - Thread pool to efficiently handle multiple simultaneous connections.
- Proper HTTP response construction including status codes and headers.
- Safe resource handling (file streams, sockets).
- Basic error handling (404 for missing files/routes).
- Non-blocking, event-driven IO using
epollor similar to replace blocking threads, maximizing throughput and lowering latency. - More robust and full HTTP/1.1 compliance, including:
- Persistent connections (
Connection: keep-alive) - More complete header parsing
- Handling chunked transfer encoding
- Supporting other HTTP methods beyond GET and POST
- Persistent connections (
- Advanced routing features:
- URL parameters
- Query string parsing
- Middleware support
- Benchmarking and profiling tools to measure and optimize throughput and latency.
- Security features like input validation, request size limits, and HTTPS support.
- Static file caching and compression (gzip, brotli).
- Graceful shutdown and signal handling.
- Logging and monitoring for production readiness.
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Build the project using CMake:
mkdir build && cd build cmake .. make
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Start the server:
./server 8080
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Test static file serving:
curl http://localhost:8080/static/index.html
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Test dynamic routes:
curl http://localhost:8080/hello curl http://localhost:8080/status curl -X POST -d "test body" http://localhost:8080/echo
Feel free to contribute ideas or improvements!
Questions or feedback? Just ask.
Happy serving! 🚀