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So it's a reverse HTTP proxy, which can also serve files locally? That's an interesting thing, no doubt, but it doesn't feel like a web-server.

I wrote a flexible reverse proxy[0] using node.js, a year or so ago, and haven't missed the ability to serve static files directly - so I'm wondering what the use-case for that is? I guess proxying to rails, or similar?

0- http://steve.org.uk/Software/node-reverse-proxy/

1 comments

Did you benchmark your node.js version? I would love to know how node stacks up here.

I agree that static serving is not as interesting, but it is useful to be able to serve up a fail-whale page!

Honestly I never have. Because in practise it is fast enough that it just didn't come up.

I'm sure that if I were to pimp the project properly then that would be a good thing to do, but half the fun of my proxy is to allow "interesting" rewrites, dynamically.

To benchmark I'd be too tempted try to game the results by doing a straight pass-through comparison to mod_proxy, nginx, etc. That would lose half of the appeal of the project in the first place.

In my experience, NodeJS was slow. I first write a boxcars-like server in NodeJS; http://github.com/azer/door

and here is the benchmarks of it; https://gist.github.com/azer/5946227