Get To Business.

The Alpha release of the Octabox service is drawing near (a week from now) and you can feel the excitement in the air. There’s a lot yet to do, and not enough time to do it. But I believe in working under pressure - for some reason, the closer I get to a deadline the more productive I become, both focus and intensity rising up to much higher levels.
I am writing this blog now as I’m taking a break from writing another “blog” titled “Lab report in Signal Analysis and operation of Lock-in Amplifier” which is due tommorow at the University. Did I mention schedule is tight around here? Good thing I don’t waste too much time on sleep.

Being the main and lone developer/programmer on this project at this point means that most of responsibility for Alpha version shipping on time is on my shoulders. There’s nobody to share the load. If I say that I can meet the release schedule, then it’s my sole responsibility to do so. Today, in our “Board meeting”, I had to sort of calm my partners, Tal and Adam, both of which were ready to postpone the release date, seeing that much is yet to be done and only one week left to the date we’ve set. I hope their trust in me would be justified.

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Choosing the right web server backend for the Octabox service was not as straightforward as it has been for me in previous endeavors.
The demands of a large scale web-application are so very different from a those of a simpler page-serving site.

In the end the choices came down to two:

Apache httpd (latest ver. 2.2.4) - Old faithful. Apache has served me exclusively thus far, it has great support, it’s very stable and its performance is certainly up there with the best of them.

Lighttpd (latest ver. 1.5.0 Pre-release, 1.4.13 Stable) - A lightweight alternative. Lighttpd (pronounced Lighty) claims to outperform its heavier counterpart.

In a nutshell, Lighttpd appears to have better support for Asynchronous transactions (aka AJAX) and also built in support for AJAX push technology (aka COMET, which I will expand upon in upcoming posts. In the meantime checkout Alex Russel’s Blog, and the COMET page in Wikipedia) which we would be relying much upon in the Octabox service. The performance gain in those areas have convinced several prominent web-applications to go the Lighttpd way (Youtube, Meebo and Wikipedia among others).

For a performance comparison, Lighttpd provided benchmarks of their own (the page is a little messy, you’ve been warned) which claim superiority. Not everyone agrees. And some more benchmarks for good measure (taken from a blog on Ruby on Rails performance).
Even more benchmarks from a competing server technology, Litespeed.

So what does this all mean

Well, for now we intend to give Apache and Lighttpd equal chance at the being the backend to power Octabox. I am personally leaning towards Lighttpd from the impressions I got concerning performance and support for cutting-edge technologies, and hopefully we can provide our own benchmarks concerning the two solutions in the near future.

Here at Octabox, we are happy to announce that Octablog is live!
Octablog will allow our team to notify you about releases.

Stay tuned,
Adam Benayoun

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