Performance

Underneath the hood of our "fastest blogging engine in the world" is in fact an engine. We built our own web server from scratch, and it is massively parallel and breathes fire. We weren't sure exactly how fast it was, but we knew it was pretty fast...

One of our OEM's, about to be announced, happens to be expert in web servers, and routinely deploy several different ones--Apache, of course, but also some more innovative high-performance servers. They benchmarked our server with some sophisticated test tools as part of the evaluation process...

Our server can handle roughly 600 times the traffic load that Apache can handle. We were clocking about 6 million hits a second across 20,000 parallel users. That's cooking with gas.

And we don't even sell it as a web server. It's just the engine on which we build lots of innovative services like blogging, podcasting, file sharing, etc.

What I think this means is that if you're considering offering a blogging service, you may need to buy one piece of hardware to run our solution, or 600 pieces of hardware to handle a comparable load with Apache. Except that the test wasn't of Perl scripts running through CGI, it was flat HTML serving. So maybe multiply that number by another 1,000 or so.

If you can't tell, I'm proud of our server. Put simply, it kicks butt.