The sys admin's daily grind – Gatling

Apache Under Fire

Article from Issue 183/2016
Author(s):

Western aficionados and sys admin Charly are about to set up a Gatling in a field that is normally home to Apache. Read on to discover why blogger Fefe is to blame.

I admit to watching (too) many westerns as a child; in other words, I'm fully aware of what a Gatling gun is: an automatic weapon with multiple rotating barrels. In old movies, soldiers used its infernal din to send the horses of attacking Apaches galloping mad. And, this always worked until an Apache warrior crept up from behind and torched the ammunition chest.

As a rapid fire weapon, the Gatling lends its name to the web server I will be looking at today. The server's binary file is a lightweight compared with its name giver, weighing in at just 100KB. Its RAM requirements are minimal, too, because Gatling [1] does not fork. On an old PC, Gatling is just as fast as on my Raspberry Pi. The daemon is even included with the plain vanilla Raspbian distribution.

The server is designed for delivering static web pages as quickly as possible. To allow this to happen, its programmer, Felix "Fefe" von Leitner, whose widely read blog [2] naturally also runs on Gatling, gave the server just as many features as the number of shells you could slot into a revolver (IPv6, TLS/SSL, simply equipped virtual hosts, login via the .htaccess mechanism).

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