Zeroserve: A zero-config web server you can script with eBPF

6/6/2026 at 7:08:20 PM

The death of the techempower web server benchmarks means new ones like this one no longer have the chance to prove themselves.

Edit: it seems I'm just falling behind and the new hotness is https://www.http-arena.com/leaderboard/. Good luck!

by password4321

6/6/2026 at 11:23:23 PM

What do you mean it's dead? It's up at: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23 with the last benchmark having been in February 2025, but they don't run their benchmarks that often, only once a year or less as its rounds history indicates.

by winter_blue

6/7/2026 at 2:43:11 AM

Maybe we're both part of today's lucky 10,000 (xkcd#1053)?

Sunsetting the Techempower Framework Benchmarks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497763

by password4321

6/6/2026 at 11:29:20 PM

LLM UI/UX is so bad. Like how hard is it to put a weekends effort into UX for something like this.

by dakolli

6/7/2026 at 2:18:01 PM

Unfortunately I might have to agree that the UI/UX isn't the strong point, as expected of a website built by a firmware developer using AI tools' help, I would appreciate any feedback on how to improve it though, regardless, the tough part on a project like this is what is invisible to the eye, stable hardware/harness and reviewing PRs in 20 different languages/technologies to keep the leaderboard competitive.

by MDA2AV

6/8/2026 at 2:03:50 AM

Its an impressive project. You could get really far by just picking a softer color palette. There's an over reliance on color coding going on that's hard on the eyes.

Optional pagination would be nice, I would use a Zebra pattern on the rows backgrounds and larger row heights but that's just me, and I'll admit making nice tables with lots of data look nice is hard. I'm also not a designer :/

The problem is when I see this color pallete I assume everything is vibe coded and then I have a hard time taking the rest of the project seriously / trusting it. I'm not sure why every llm generated UI uses those colors, but they do. I'm not sure how it ended up so concretely in their training data either because this wasn't ever the norm. I think the models just start with Red Blue Green Yellow and then expect the user to adjust from there, idk.

by dakolli

6/8/2026 at 10:16:25 PM

Thanks for feedback, applied some simpler UI/UX with zebra pattern tables but yea it is quite rough designing these tables that pack so much information in them.

by MDA2AV

6/8/2026 at 3:01:30 AM

Maybe just go hard in the opposite direction, absolutely bare minimum spartan UI... I'm not an expert on AI UI but the problem with generated text is that it smells like AI aka the same/average with a few key tells that set off people's radar, not necessarily that it is terrible (more of a vibe check?).

Host a design competition and pay contestants with exposure! ;)

by password4321

6/8/2026 at 8:25:42 PM

Did some changes to it https://www.http-arena.com/ :o

by MDA2AV

6/8/2026 at 2:59:44 AM

Maybe just go hard in the opposite direction, absolutely bare minimum spartan UI... the problem is mostly that it looks AI, not necessarily that it looks terrible.

by password4321

6/6/2026 at 11:58:46 PM

Spot on. It’s painful to see someone build something technically impressive only to do a disservice to their own effort with a bad interface.

by j_clark

6/6/2026 at 5:35:26 PM

I love seeing stuff like this that would probably not exist if not for LLMs making exploring these kinds of ideas relatively cheap and quick to do.

My takeaway from this though is that nginx is pretty impressive on its own. Also this stuck out:

It's meant to be an alternative to nginx and Caddy, and the design bet is about configuration. Those servers give you a declarative config language - location blocks, rewrite rules, map directives, try_files - and then, once the declarative language hits its limits, an optional scripting runtime bolted on the side (Lua, or Caddy's plugins). Behavior ends up split across two layers: directives that quietly grow their own control flow, plus scripts that run somewhere in the request lifecycle you have to keep in your head.

I think the bet is misplaced - people prefer configuration over code and long have. The built-ins meet enough peoples needs entirely and they don't need to write C code.

by jarym

6/6/2026 at 11:39:40 PM

I wouldn’t be so sure.

Seems like every configuration file format starts off simple. Look at YAML - the basics started off pretty sensibly.

And then people decided they wanted to get fancier with anchors and aliases. Even GitLab has its own form of conditionals and variables, which is all a bit of a hack (only works in certain places).

Even Apache fell into this with its XML based config format.

So we end up with numerous “bespoke” programming languages for configuration management. Of course enterprise people don’t edit these directly - they script Ansible workflows to remotely perform the surgery.

Sadly, could have skipped all that and just have embedded a Lua/Python/etc. interpreter into servers to do the configuration management. Would be simpler than trying to programmatically edit bespoke config files.

Sure, one will say all the bespoke attempts are optimized for a specific use the way a general language isn’t. Except that only fits a narrow class of toy examples which wouldn’t have needed their machinery in the first place!

Remember Windows INI files? Back in the good ol’ days when code was code and data was data….

by BobbyTables2

6/6/2026 at 7:06:49 PM

I'd wager that in the next 96 hours, with a LLM, someone could create a translator that would 'pack' a nginx or caddy configuration file into the relevant code that zeroserve could use. Or even more simply, just pickup all the Ingress manifests in a kubernetes cluster and rebuild the pack. The point being, the interface between the tool and the configuration is just another API, system operators are already describing the state of the system at higher level constructs, and the specific bytes that make up the configuration are an artifact of that.

by jasonjayr

6/7/2026 at 2:18:10 AM

Are you wagering that "someone could" or "someone will" do this? How much are you willing to wager?

by NewJazz

6/6/2026 at 6:04:48 PM

I suspect it's worth exploring if that will change as AI is allowing more and more "human words -> machine effect", which may be more ergonomic for the AIs. It could take a long time for that kind of shift to become clearly a good idea since the AI can make either work.

by lelandbatey

6/6/2026 at 6:34:35 PM

What about abstracting the complexity and achieving "config file" configuration with macros?

by high_priest

6/6/2026 at 6:43:53 PM

Why are you so eager to credit LLMS.. Just because they wrote the article with the help of an LLM doesnt mean they're out here having LLMs do the experiments for them.

by ai_fry_ur_brain

6/6/2026 at 7:58:41 PM

The commit history shows plenty of coding agent involvement: https://github.com/losfair/zeroserve/commits/main/

by simonw

6/6/2026 at 7:00:29 PM

because it makes it easy to create/reverse engineer projects/explore on a whim without putting up a lot of time

LLM enables a lot of good output if you know what you are doing

by zuzululu

6/6/2026 at 11:34:51 PM

[flagged]

by ai_fry_ur_brain

6/7/2026 at 1:18:33 AM

You are absolutely right!

by zuzululu

6/6/2026 at 7:02:26 PM

Bayesian inference suggests otherwise.

by antonvs

6/6/2026 at 5:00:22 PM

Looks good, nice features. But somehow the spark does not ignite on my side because it feels too artificial. I don't know if the metrics are faked, if the convenience functions actually work, if there is any proper hardening.

I can accept if stuff is vibe coded and has autogenerated README. But even the announcement blogpost is AI-generated, and I personally have zero data points to see if your understanding of software quality is the same as mine.

It's a weird world, if this would've been announced without any AI disclaimers some years earlier I would've eaten it up without a doubt. But right now if I see a fancy README with several good-looking command line parameters I immediately wonder if the README is hallucinated and the command line parameters actually exist.

by bflesch

6/6/2026 at 5:29:14 PM

Hi, author here - a few critical pieces of this, like async-ebpf, were written long before those coding agents were released. I use AI assistance a lot when creating zeroserve itself, but I manually check AI output and take responsibility for it :)

by losfair

6/6/2026 at 8:50:23 PM

I'm of the school of thought that if a practicing/retired software engineer (i.e. someone I reasonably believe has experience writing software for "production") wrote it, I've got to show it's trash, rather than assume it's trash. "Innocent until proven guilty" and all that. But I'm in the rather luxurious position of mostly using open source, rather than maintaining it, so I understand that others come down differently on this topic.

FWIW, I like the writeup and concept behind this. Very close to some passions of mine (like serving a website from a single-file archive).

by rpdillon

6/6/2026 at 6:59:23 PM

Happy to hear, I hope the tool can prove itself to a wider audience then.

by bflesch

6/6/2026 at 5:51:59 PM

if the point is to avoid the lua-issue on nginx, how do you expect people will implement things like geoip, request content match post ssl termination, etc?

by iririririr

6/6/2026 at 5:04:39 PM

Given the benchmarks:

Small static file (174 B) - the bread and butter of static sites:

server req/s p99

zeroserve 36,681 5.4 ms

nginx 31,226 7.8 ms

Caddy 12,830 22 ms

zeroserve serves small files about 17% faster than nginx on a single core, with a tighter tail. HTML pages, small JSON, CSS - this is the case zeroserve is tuned for.

Large static file (100 KB):

server req/s throughput p99

zeroserve 8,000 782 MB/s 22 ms

nginx 7,600 773 MB/s 28 ms

Caddy 6,084 590 MB/s 44 ms

I'd go with a more storied project that's been audited, battle tested, hardened etc than this upstart. There's not enough improvement to justify the risk.

by gigatexal

6/6/2026 at 6:26:50 PM

The problem with pasting LLM output is that no human with sound mind and body would waste their finite time on this Earth informing you that small static files are "the bread and butter of static sites".

by tadfisher

6/6/2026 at 7:12:21 PM

I'm convinced that LLMs somehow settled on the middle manager as the exemplar of human cognition that it tries its best to emulate.

I could totally see "Small static files are the bread and butter of static sites" appearing in some pointless deck on a Zoom call.

by antonvs

6/6/2026 at 8:12:32 PM

> It's a weird world, if this would've been announced without any AI disclaimers some years earlier I would've eaten it up without a doubt. But right now if I see a fancy README with several good-looking command line parameters I immediately wonder if the README is hallucinated and the command line parameters actually exist.

Yeah, that is unfortunate. Recently there was this ffmpeg-wasm project. I tested it. It worked. But it was vibe-coded AI. I can't stand AI. Even if things work.

I decided to stay in the oldschool era as much as possible. Clever people publish software. Clever people maintain software. They don't need AI. That's my niche.

We may die out but I still prefer that. (Oh, and only if these clever people write documentation. Many clever people hate writing documentation. I decided a long time ago that if software comes without documentation, it is not worth my time, no matter how great that documentation is. This refers mostly to on-the-application side; I only rarely looked at the Linux documentation, but others stated that it is not too terrible either, so who knows.)

by shevy-java

6/6/2026 at 5:29:41 PM

I like the idea.

I think I'd feel more comfortable if I could drop an .rs file into the eBPF dir instead of a .c one. It's already a Rust project! :)

And for some reason I was expecting this to be a kernel-accelerated webserver - if that could be done safely using eBPF that would be amazing!

Also, single-threaded? Forking and sharing an incoming connection queue is basically trivial on Linux, that should be literally just a few lines, even with Rust. Use SO_REUSEPORT and the kernel will do the rest.

FWIW, if you're going to push for io_uring, you should also be pushing kTLS IMO, you'll drastically simplify your design if you can avoid pumping userspace SSL after the handshake.

by mmastrac

6/6/2026 at 5:52:15 PM

Hi, thanks!

Will implement forking + SO_REUSEPORT. I've been using nftables for things like this so haven't needed it for myself yet :)

by losfair

6/8/2026 at 4:51:23 AM

Pleas think before forking(). Do not follow Apache blindly...

Code, as is today, looks [acording to benchmarks] better then nginx, except one case !

There is fcgi in, right ? So all that additional processes are already started in the backend. If benchmarks are real no need to complicate code before some industry adoption. Of course there can be a branch to check possibilities :)

And forking is complicated and full of surprising traps. Even if they are somewhat "standard" historic Unix traps... Case study: Perl - better don't use fork there even if "threads" are in.

by Woodi

6/7/2026 at 1:57:12 AM

I wonder how zs_reverse_proxy() + SO_REUSEPORT would perform

by opem

6/7/2026 at 4:40:24 AM

I was curious for the same thing, so I quickly (with an agent) threw support for .rs scripts together on my fork:

https://github.com/tekacs/zeroserve/commit/b33f261615d20d55b...

It does leave me wondering about other runtimes that could be used as the go-between though, because at the point of compiling Rust, an approach like Cloudflare's Pingora (https://github.com/cloudflare/pingora) which I've tried using before... in _theory_ should be a 'nicer' solution - just historically awkward when I've tried using it the way that I'd have liked. Wish it were more library-shaped!

by tekacs

6/6/2026 at 8:50:06 PM

It’s an interesting new concept I like it.

The real question is developer commitment and community - the Caddy and Nginx people have worked constantly on supporting their products. It’s going to take a lot of focus and attention.

by andrewstuart

6/7/2026 at 2:12:29 AM

I was just thinking about eBPF and I stumbled upon this, what a coincident!

Very interesting idea and thanks for the no bs benchmarks! I wonder if this architecture could be ported to webservers with dynamic content/logic, too.

by opem

6/6/2026 at 7:21:22 PM

Very cool! would be interesting to see about combining this with other bpf program types like xdp progs, or socket map attached programs to integrate L7 http features downward.

by razighter777

6/6/2026 at 6:19:46 PM

Cool idea, but I don't think you should focus on static files. People rarely spin up a server for that these days.

by mmarian

6/6/2026 at 6:44:05 PM

I did last week (converted ghost to static) and was half wondering if some self contained binary wouldn't be faster so I feel like this was made for me, but I accept I'm not the typical user

by dwedge

6/6/2026 at 7:14:43 PM

You just helped to dredge up a memory, which brought me back to this fascinating project:

https://redbean.dev

If this piques your interest, make sure to check out the portable C library used to create it, which is also fascinating:

https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

by arcanemachiner

6/6/2026 at 9:10:26 PM

These projects are fascinating, and I referenced them in a nearby comment about static hosting from archives. I need to try the latest versions to see how they work at higher scale (more data in the archive).

by rpdillon

6/6/2026 at 7:29:58 PM

Why not let Clouflare/GitHub/etc do it for you? Free, and you don't have to worry about security and availability.

by mmarian

6/6/2026 at 10:13:55 PM

Because handing off control of a static site to a company that already controls XX% of the Internet for "security" goes against everything I believe in. And availability, cloudflare and github?

by dwedge

6/6/2026 at 7:03:09 PM

Depends on the domain. There's a bunch of sciences using large datasets served up efficiently using static file formats, e.g., https://zarr.dev/ and https://parquet.apache.org/

by lmc

6/6/2026 at 7:34:43 PM

Admit I'm not familiar with that domain. But don't people use managed services even there? In my job we host parquet files on S3.

by mmarian

6/7/2026 at 4:04:05 AM

True, we use S3 a lot too. But it's interesting to think of alternatives like this project, e.g., for when we don't have the setup for a full on block storage service.

by lmc

6/6/2026 at 7:10:12 PM

I did it yesterday.

by Fordec

6/7/2026 at 12:24:04 PM

how did you come to this conclusion ?

by romania1

6/6/2026 at 6:58:52 PM

Why a tarball?

by rashkov

6/6/2026 at 8:00:14 PM

It's a simple format easily suitable for accessing resources by byte ranges, that everyone has tooling for, and which _doesn't_ compress things.

by cwillu

6/6/2026 at 9:03:42 PM

It would be interesting to extend it to zip, which is what redbean/greenbean use to serve static assets.

Back in school, I worked on a project called Velox, with a partner - the idea was to take a bz2-compressed dump of the giant XML export of wikipedia, and write a program to serve that copy of wikipedia from disk (this was in 2008-2010? in my master's program, so before Kiwix and the amazing zim dumps they produce). My partner worked on the UI and indexing, and I was focusing on how to parse the bz2 compression format to locate article boundaries in the (giant) XML dump that Wikipedia provides. I ended up putting a lot of time into it because it was a bunch of fun.

Writing this just sent me back to the presentation I made. The slide I wrote back then said:

> Significant original work went into creation of archive access. The Apache BZip2 library that is part of Ant was used as a basis for archive access.

> Modified to support random access to a given byte/bit offset pair within the compressed data stream (BZip2 is not a byte-aligned format) > Extended to index all BZip2 block positions, allowing Java-based pseudo-random access to BZip2 compressed data > Extended to map article IDs to block numbers for constant-time article retrieval, even in BZip2 archives exceeding 5GB in size

> Current article retrieval times are ~2 seconds.

This is back when the archive was ~7GB IIRC. My Kiwix dumps today are ~120GB, but that includes images.

This is the link to the presentation in Google Slides that we wrote back in 2008 or so. The version history shows 2013, but I think some kind of import/conversion happened around that time.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vTfrxEqvHbd0...

by rpdillon

6/7/2026 at 1:28:06 AM

Zip isn't useful for random access here; the problem with random access in HTTP serving is then you have to decompress the data and potentially recompress.

The more interesting trick you can do with zip files for HTTP serving is to serve the compressed deflate stream as gzip, or use Zstd inside zip. Then you have a valid zip file from which bytes can be served directly.

I have some code which does this at https://git.sr.ht/~dgl/deserve/

by dgl

6/7/2026 at 10:03:09 AM

As opposed to, I don't know, a _file system_?

by hackrmn

6/6/2026 at 7:00:51 PM

Well, according to first paragraph of the section titled "One tarball, served in place":

The whole site is a single tar file. zeroserve indexes it on load - building a path -> byte-range map - and then serves files by issuing byte-range reads against the tarball itself. Nothing is ever unpacked to disk. The site lives entirely in that one file, so there's no document root for a stray location rule to expose, and a deploy is a single atomic file swap.

OTOH, that could be an LLM justification, since the copy is littered with -isms like "the right shape" or "the surface is broad".

by Terretta

6/6/2026 at 9:00:20 PM

Thanks, I missed that during my read of it

by rashkov

6/7/2026 at 4:09:53 AM

OT, Another benchmarks showing Caddy not performing on par with Nginx. And the difference aren't so either, roughly 2.5x in small asset serving at nearly 3x latency. On normal 100KB static files it is 20% less throughput but most importantly nearly double the latency.

Unfortunately, Caddy seems to take less concern on this.

Zeroserve already beats Nginx in performance. Hopefully someday it would catch up to Caddy's features.

by ksec

6/7/2026 at 8:42:02 AM

Well there's less concern because of how no one cares about latency these days.

You don't serve up a bazillion js files and care about latency. You also don't serve up files from all over the web (fonts from google, jquery or whatever from their site) unless you don't care about having control over your own latency.

A static HTML page renders in under 20ms for me these days, if the site is near. Some of these pages with immense blather of js take > 10 seconds to fully download and render. So... in that world, who cares if it's 5 seconds or 6 seconds?

by b112

6/7/2026 at 1:06:06 AM

Is there a web server in eBPF though?

by lost9

6/6/2026 at 8:28:30 PM

this looks amazing

by z3ratul163071

6/6/2026 at 6:44:32 PM

[dead]

by Lapsa

6/6/2026 at 8:50:49 PM

[flagged]

by MagicMoonlight

6/6/2026 at 9:07:52 PM

> All you did was ask the slop generator to make it.

Is this founded? I know it's popular to trash every new project that's built with AI in the pipeline somewhere, but there's a big difference between a project built by someone with years of experience writing software and some vibing a repo with Claude. Isn't it worth distinguishing between the two?

In the case of this project: a non-technical person couldn't even conceive of this product. So I think some kind of evidence should be presented before we say things like "Is it a logical design? Who knows."

EDIT: Taking a look at the source, it looks very good. https://github.com/losfair/zeroserve/blob/main/src/server.rs is an important part of the functionality, and it looks like it had a fair amount of attention paid to the implementation, including multiple refactors.

by rpdillon

6/6/2026 at 9:07:15 PM

You should post the results of your source code audit.

by jhack