/e: non-CDN site, hosted on EC2, safe ciphers+hash algos without crypto HW accelerators etc. Average business website. With WordPress it is even worse. The CDN lets us terminate TLS and fetch origin in plain text + optimisations on crypto etc.

In my opinion, this should be _welcomed_ by WebDev community - this does improve privacy. In theory, DE court is right - your website should force user to connect only to itself.

I clearly see 2 ways of making this even simpler: use Lynx :-) or Tor Browser. The importance of Tor in today's business should increase. Yes, there are "shady" things there - but there they were in "clearnet" back in 90x ...

Makes sense.

There are plenty of books around. And there are literally thousands of people worldwide practicing this "lost" art daily.

Starting from small corp up to the major cloud providers. (Someone has to support those computers, running the "serverless" things")

My word of advice: start with the "philosophy". One program doing only one task but extremely well, "everything is a file" etc.

Understand why people are unhappy with SystemD. :-) Find out how kernel schedulers impact databases' IO. Write a boring program in C - network server which forks on accept4. Tip your toe in Perl 5 - there is lots of it in *nix and BSD. Still most stable and efficient way of writing CGI script ... Find out why Ksh is faster than Bash.

It is truly exciting world, and the best news is that it "fits" as a glove the modern world of JS and async programming etc.

I wouldn't call it "lost" - it is just dozen of levels of abstractions down, efficient, boring and complex. But powerful and unforgiving to typos :-)

I am glad someone actually is reading about all that.

I _just_finished_ my own comparative benchmarks to (re)check my projects from ~7 years ago, all in similar stack.

Back then I wrote the logic as Apache modules, in C. It was using Cairo to draw charts (surprisingly, the traces of trigonometry knowledge was enough for me to code that :-), and I had absolutely crazy "hybrids" of bubble charts with bars, alpha channel overlays etc. It was extremely useful for my projects back then and I never seen any library, able to produce what I "tailored" ...)

The 7-years-ago end-to-end page generation time was ~300 mcs (1e-6 sec), with graphics, data store IO and request processing, preparing the "bucket brigade" and passing it down the Apache chain.

This Jan I re-visited my code and implemented logic for OpenBSD httpd as:

** 1) Open BSD httpd "patch" to hijack the request processing internally, do necessary data and graph ops and push the result into Bufferevent buffer directly, before httpd serves it up to the client.

** 2) FCGI responder app, talking to httpd over unix socket. BTW: this is most secure version I know of, I could chroot / pledge / unveil and, IMO, it beats SELinux and anything else.

3) CGI script in ksh<=>slowcgi<=>FCGI=>httpd

4) CGI program (statically linked) in pure C<=>slowcgi<=>FCGI=>httpd

5) PHP :-) page (no frameworks)<=>php-fpm (with OpCache)<=>FCGI=>httpd

To my extreme surprise, the outcome was clear - it did not matter what I wrote my logic in, _anything today_ (including CGI shell script) is so fast, that 90% of time was spent on Network communication between the WebServer and the Browser. (And with TLS it is like 2x penalty ...)

All options above gave me end-to-end page generation time about 1-1.5 ms.

Guess what? Beyond "Hello World", with page size of 500Kb+, PHP was faster than anything else, including native "httpd patch" in C.

As side effect, I also confirmed that Libevent-based absolutely gorgeous OpenBSD httpd works slightly slower than standard pre-fork Apache httpd from pkg_add. (It gave me sub-ms times, just like 7 years ago)

Who would say ...

What also happened is that any framework (PHP or I even tried nodejs) or writing CGI in Python increased my end-to-end page generation time 10x, to double-digit ms.

I remember last week someone here was talking about writing business applications / servers for clients in C++, delivering them as single executable file.

I would be very interested to hear how that person's observations correlate with mine above.

G'day everyone!