Theory vs. Practice

Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice. Martin H. Fischer

How G-WAN went from 850k RPS (in 2012) to 242m RPS (in 2025)

Wonder why China leads BigTech? U.S. and European products are all the same: not performing, nor safe, not innovating – yet a few vendors get all the business. Copy & paste has replaced R&D (for the sake of infinite debt-financing growth). Jobs are disappearing, and the ones that remain are boring. I will show here how we can (and therefore should) do much better.

After 45 years of engineering, I have seen a lot of organizations, platforms, people and programs. I always felt there was a fundamental difference between people (and therefore their speeches and works). I believe that it explains how G-WAN has evolved while all others have stagnated.

In 2009, I wrote G-WAN because none of the available HTTP servers was matching my needs. When I had something to publish (faster, simpler, more reliable) I shared my work as a freeware with my views about what was (and still is) wrong elsewhere.

In 2025, G-WAN (242m RPS) is 453 times faster than NGINX (555k RPS) with 10k users, an uncached 100-byte file, on an Intel Core i9 CPU. With such energy and hardware specs, my $1.5k PC is a Cloud.

In 2025, Wikipedia states that Google uses 2.5 million servers to serve an estimated 40m searches per second – multiplied by 5 as "4 parts responds to a part of the request, and the GWS assembles their responses and serves the final response to the user" said Google in a 2003 report.

200m RPS (5 * 40m RPS) served by 2.5m servers (200m / 2.5m = 80 RPS per server. The potential energy and hardware costs are gigantic, hence the GAFAM now buying nuclear plants to cope with the increasing traffic and operating costs!

Who needs scalability? Startups? Internet, Phone & TV networks? Data centers, Web hosting and Could operators? Video streaming platforms? Payment platforms? Social networks? The GAFAM (operating systems, Web browsers, search engines)? Government administrations? Stock exchanges? Clearing houses? Banks?

Already we can see that some of these players have an incentive at promoting inefficiency (and censoring efficiency) to preseve (or grow) their revenues – at the expenses of their customers (the largest of all being governments, that is, taxpayers).

If you can't (or don't want to) buy nuclear plants, there's G-WAN.

In 1979, when I started programming in asm, MS-DOS did not exist. End-users, large and small, naturally spent their money only on good things (life is too short to waste time on junk).

In 2009, while I ported G-WAN from Windows (1993) to Linux (1991), G-WAN was my first Linux program. So, I was looking at the source code of some programs (like NGINX) to find what Linux system calls were needed, and how to use them.

Seeing this, I assumed that, given their age, the Linux APIs used by G-WAN (epoll, pthreads, etc.) would be stable (and their bugs fixed) so that G-WAN would run fine in the foreseeable future. That was a reasonable assumption. But it was wrong, this is a structural issue:

Had the dynamic-linking choice been accidental, every distribution would have copied Alpine Linux.
They didn't, proof that this bad choice was not accidental.

How can it be that dynamic-linking, yet another "insult to the human brain", the infamous "the Microsoft Windows DLL Hell", has infiltrated Unix and survived more than 30 years – in an operating system made by people considering themselves as the best of the best?

In 1984, a Turing award reminded us how the U.S. DoD explained in 1973 how to penetrate computer programs "without detection":

On Windows and Linux, this vulnerability is enforced by a LibC (or other languages runtimes) designed to work only as shared libraries (that your programs will rely on, before and after they have been remotely updated).

Exactly like when our communications and Web sites are pirated while we have been educated to blindly trust third-parties in love with ubiquitous kill-switches. And so we:

1. embed Web resources hosted by third-parties in our Web pages (JS, fonts, pictures, videos) that can trigger vulnerabilities (or break features) on both sides (clients and servers) – even on a per-case basis (targeting your largest customer for example),
   
   
2. use Web browsers doing encrypted telemetry (collecting everything typed at your keyboard, done and said in the room, all modified files on your disks, selling backdoors [1] to anyone paying for remote access to your machine; nobody cares, so the sky is the limit – note that the same clandestine activities take place in our smartphones and connected-cars, a regulatory obligation since 2006),
   
   
3. pay for "SSL certificates" that are bypassed by hundreds of thousands of "root certificates" used by tens of thousands of government agencies and private companies (also without oversight),
   
   
4. deploy "secure" SSL and TLS layers which are much more vulnerable than the than the "unsafe" HTTP/1.1 protocol (HTTP/3 needs twice the server hardware, and enforces TLS and DoH (usually already used by HTTP/2), cutting essential security features: traffic oversight and DNS hosts blacklists used for decades by network administrators eager to control and limit what's happening on their LAN):
   

   Version	Date	Specs	Key Features
   HTTP/0.9	1991	-	TCP, one-line text protocol with only the GET method
   HTTP/1	1996	RFC 1945	TCP, status codes, HTTP header, optional keep-alive connections, POST and HEAD
   HTTP/1.1	1997	RFC 9112	TCP, by-default keep-alive connections, more methods, etc.
   HTTP/2	2015	RFC 9113	TCP, binary framing layer, multiplexing, header compression (HPACK), server-side push
   HTTP/3	2022	RFC 9114	UDP, QUIC, TLS by default, header compression (QPACK), connection ID, more about it here

   
   
5. forget that the only way to guaranty mutual authentication and payload integrity (without delegating all our security chain to third-parties) is for the DNS/Web/Email/VPN Apps to actually let end-users sign and verify themselves their requests/responses,
   
   
6. deploy ever-failing encryption standards:
   
   "The move away from prescriptive standards towards a focus on outcomes under the NIS Regulations was welcomed because: standards are soon rendered out-of-date by fast-changing threats and the frequent discovery of previously unknown vulnerabilities".
   –Cyber Security of the UK's Critical National Infrastructure

Is really the taxpayer happy to see his own money constantly used against him? Would we continue funding so generously the ones betraying us if we had the choice? Certainly not – and that's why the taxpayer is not given a voice about where his money goes (governments are by far the largest Cloud buyers)!

But there's worse. And this time the imperatives of "Defense" (which is "Offense" in reality) cannot be invoked: it's mere fraud.

Static linking explains how G-WAN has survived despite the Linux planned obsolescence, but it does not explain G-WAN's massive progress in performance.

While ditching GNU LibC calls I wrote SLIMalloc, a memory allocator that was faster than all others in 2020... on the top of having no "memory-safety" vulnerabilities. Why? Because, surprise-surprise, most of the ever-growing errors affecting G-WAN were "memory-safety" errors (courtesy of GLibC(!) as my 2023 SLIMalloc paper illustrated it in graphic details). GLibC was in good company: all the memory allocators were weaponized: their flaws were well-known and... actively exploited (most of Google Chrome vulnerabilities are memory issues, and Google Android has the largest percentage of memory issues of all OSes).

The XKCD "Manual Override", reloaded:
All these years, as I was rewriting some of the many GNU LibC APIs, it was clear that many were redundant and pointlessly complex, involving the memory allocator for no reason, etc. (too many untrustworthy, technically-unjustifiable design choices).

Like two decades earlier (when I revisited "secure" protocols and encryption standards) this made me increasingly doubt of the will of the people in charge to work for the common-good: it was not clear if some half-backed features like epoll(7), aio(7) or io_uring (praised for merely delivering 10% gains in corner cases) result from a lack of competence, or from a plan to waste people's time by increasing their learned helplessness.

G-WAN has made this giant leap in performance, durability and security by questioning the operating system – and by avoiding its many traps designed to keep us captive and impotent.

Nobody was helping me, nobody was eager to pay me, and myriads of trolls were sabotaging, censoring and denigrating my work, many of them appointed by our governments. Two decades without revenues have left my family in a difficult situation, reducing my business options, our kids' options and their future.

Like Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) hitting a wall of denial erected by his astronomers peers funded by religious authorities, I have been targeted by the "Holly Inquisition" condemning my achievements for contradicting their gospel. My only sin was to do the right thing. Shame on the many that have used State-powers and public money to hurt me, block progress, and hide their criminal acts.

Back to the OS planned obsolescence.

If you discover that you need this list of endless workarounds (say, to keep a program working despite constant system changes), then this information may have value (especially when disclosed before the gratuitous system changes are deployed).

You may consider paying for it. But then you will depend on someone (who has demonstrated a natural inclination for extortion). By merely delaying your access to this list, this someone can raise prices or eradicate your business, by the press of a button. Further, having paid for something without any guaranteed value, you will have no recourse.

Since this list is constantly obsoleted by new arbitrary modifications and trivial bugs, then it does not look like technical progress at all. It's a cheap trick to keep the competition at bay: only the ones at the switch will be able to make their programs working at all times... because, well, they are the ones that have created the problems in the first place.

As SLIMalloc has demonstrated, the so-called "security" industry generates its revenues exactly in the same deceptive way – with a never-ending trap and never through progress: on the contrary, as time goes the security market grows exponentially, demonstrating the inefficience of eye-wateringly expensive "security" products which themselves are... injecting critical vulnerabilities! (Kaspersky and Symantec show that this is an international issue). Light is the best disinfectant.

The open-source ecosystem (GNU, Linux) did not invent this trick: since day one, Microsoft had a very similar system in place, and Remote-Anything (TWD's 1998 first product, with 280m licenses deployed in 138 countries) had to replace several Win32 API and LibC calls on a weekly basis to merely stay alive (making the executable file grow, yet run faster, and more reliably).

RA was surviving – thus the need for the Microsoft VIA (Virus Information Alliance) well-funded proxies, and later for Windows "Defender", to eradicate the (from their point of view undesirable) competitors that do not directly contribute to Microsoft revenues by paying a tax to merely see their programs survive... an operating system acting like an ever-reconfigured mines field.

The exponential scale of this 2009 benchmark allows to understand why Microsoft Windows "Defender" felt the urge to erase G-WAN... 3 days after a conference call with 5 Microsoft directors eager to buy the G-WAN source-code to improve abysmal Microsoft IIS v7+ performance.

Microsoft operates as a criminal organization – read the U.S. DoJ findings (they can't "debunk" officially collected evidences, so they bribe officials to erase public records and to avoid DoJ sanctions).

According to the rule of law, all of these tactics are criminal, and if the laws were applied then these illegal behaviors would disappear overnight. That's why officials are paid for the laws not to be applied – or only with symbolic sanctions (immediately compensated by golden subsides, public and private investments, and recurring public contracts).

The result of destroying competition is more expenses for end-users (G-WAN allows you to do more with less, and that's why it has been illegally deleted by Windows, and ousted from the market by coordinated sabotage, censorship and denigration) by G-WAN competitors.

Deceiving others does not require much talent (nor efforts) – and so, most probably, it explains its success among the people cumulating limited intellects, skills, and respect for commonly-praised human values designed to let people live together – you shall not murder, steal, lie, etc. (fostering productive cooperation) instead of constantly stealing and killing each-other (a sterile zero-sum game).

Even worse, unlike others, the people-naturally-inclined-to-cheat (rather than to perform themselves) are now in charge to manage others, and their addiction for undue honors is encouraged by a string of easy (yet self-defeating) successes that invariably leads them to even more limited intellects, skills, and respect for human values. Tip: these characteristics are most often a reliable way to spot them, this and their endless desire to eradicate anyone doing better (instead of seizing an opportunity to learn and make progress).

This same scheme rules all the domains of our society (toxic placebos are sold as a false cure to an artificially created problem, leading to more placebos to correct the side-effects of the previous toxic placebos, and so on – with spiraling costs).

From time to time, some "experts" present themselves publicly as THE reference to consult (at a price, obviously: "free-software" is free, but not the information about how to make it run, properly, or durably).

To promote themselves, they often form alliances with similar people, and help each-other by constantly attacking their mutual competitors, but most of the time they are just mercenaries available for hire. Microsoft "Evangelims is War" is famous for how such toxic ecosystems have been created and endlessly funded (despite being totally illegal):

 "The elements of evangelical infrastructure are conference presentations, magazine articles
  (media press), white-papers etc (pseudo technical reviews) and they start hitting the streets
  at the start of the 'Slog'. They should be numerous so as to push all other..off the shelf.

 Working behind the scenes to orchestrate 'independent praise of our technology, and damnation
 of the enemies' is a key evangelism function during the Slog.

 'Independent' consultants should write columns and articles, give conference presentations and
 moderate stacked panels, all on our behalf (and setting them up as experts in new technology,
 available for just $200 hour).

 A stacked panel on the other hand is like a stacked deck. It's stacked with people, who, on
 the face of things should be neutral, but who are in fact strong supporters of our technology.

 'Independent analysts' reports should be issued, praising your technology and damming the
 competitors (or ignoring them).

 'Independent' academic sources should be cultivated and quoted (and research money granted)."
 

Their proudly say that "the Matrix has you" because that's an invisible, endless trap and most among us do not even suspect it's there.

  Such treacherous tactics, when funded by big money, leave little room for merit, if any, hence their constant shameless lies.

As a direct consequence, the quality of all financially-successful technologies and products falls – like the know-how and even the Temple of Knowledge (private and public academic research) is corrupted from top to bottom. In the total lack of sanctions because the authorities were selected and/or paid to look elsewhere, it is not accidental that the worldwide 2019 health crisis has been yet another perfect execution of this lame tactic (by the same people): if constant sabotage has worked on computers, why not do it to humans?

How to call a thing presenting itself as "free and open markets" where only the least efficient solutions have the right to exist?

The most sneaky ones pick an inactive or retired target (a kind that rarely retaliates) feeling that they are immune to judicial measures.

I have been really busy working hard for a while. They, instead, troll competitors, an activity consuming almost all their agenda, hence the poor progress of their products: NGINX, like all the other servers listed on Wikipedia, are hundred times slower than G-WAN!

That's how I learned about Willy Tarreau (HAProxy), a self-evaluated, well-promoted "expert", aiming to make the form match the function.

The horrendous charge of Willy Tarreau (HAProxy) is not only factually (1) misattributed (INTEL Research wrote these sysctls) and (2) misplaced (INTEL was right), it is also totally (3) gratuitous (G-WAN did not compete with HAProxy).

Further, the delay between the questions and answers suggests a coordinated fraud: one year after the blogpost, Jarrod answers to Willy's comment in 12 minutes (other users get answers in days, not minutes, except for a few comments of people suggesting, under obvious pseudonyms carrying their own message, that other HTTP servers should be tested).

This kind of fake or complacent blogs, inconditional opportunistic collaboration in anti-competitive activities, or secret lucrative collusion against anyone doing better, allows them to pretend that they are genuinely working for the common good (rather than endlessly spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about a competitor, on gazillions of such blogposts, papers, magazines, conferences, etc.):

These contents, which are denigration campaigns under the disguise of legitimate blogs, are then indexed by search engines (owned by the GAFAM). Their goal since 2009 is to hit G-WAN revenues, by (a) someone pretending to bring better information, and (b) abusing anyone not having the time (and/or the skills) to spot the lies.

This is not an accident, this is a well-funded criminal system:

How do they make money? They proudly expose their successes on Wikipedia, so let's pick an example:

"The Fastly platform is built on top of Varnish" (what a stupid idea to use a Web-server "accelerator" that's slower than Nginx!).

Founded in 2011 by A. Bergman, the Fastly CDN (NYSE:FSLY, assets: $1.53 billion) had a 2023 revenue of $506 million and a net income of $133 million (11 times less than its assets) hiring former directors of Alphabet and CISCO. Bergman was the former CTO of Wikia, a privately held, for-profit Delaware company founded by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and funded by Amazon.

Oops. This summary alone demonstrates that this community has a passion for incestuous business relations (Bergman was European, like Varnish – yet, while lacking any distinctive technology and know-how, they get a royal treatment from U.S. Venture Capitalists, and the largest U.S. market leaders).

These connections may also explain why Varnish is quoted on 64 Wikipedia pages (while G-WAN was censored from wikipedia by... Per Buer, the Varnish CEO). But following the precepts of Microsoft "Evangelism is War" (a self-incriminating evidence seized by the U.S. DoJ) make all of them deserve the same sanctions (that Microsoft had canceled, by President Bush Jr.).

In 2012, fastly would have been at least 10 times more efficient (and therefore much more profitable) with G-WAN... and in 2025, more than 1,000 times more efficient with G-WAN (rather than with the slow and usafe Varnish).

• 2013 Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding
• 2014 Fastly acquired CDN Sumo (the capacity they lacked)
• 2014 Fastly raised $40 million in Series C funding
• 2015 Fastly raised $75 million in Series D funding
• 2015 Google partnered with Fastly (because Google's 2.5 million servers were not enough)
• 2017 Fastly raised $50 million in funding
• 2018 Fastly raised $40 million in funding
• 2019 Fastly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange

$215 million (10+40+75+50+40) in funding and contracts with Google have helped to lift yet another nonsensical activity.

$215 million was only the begining: assets of $1.53 billion (top of the line hardware servers and network infrastructure) were much needed to make the pig fly (even a slow, wasting memory and CPU, unsafe software server like Varnish can shine if, without consideration for the pointlessly involved extra costs, you throw enough hardware to compensate its flaws).

Our pension funds, the ones investing in these disastrous companies, have been deprived from the revenue that a competent and honest management would have generated (had they chosen the most efficient solutions, rather than enriching their friends and family at the expense of the shareholders).

The money has not been lost: it has more than generously rewarded the worst industry players (and hardware manufacturers probably owned by Blackrock, Vanguard or State-Street – the owners of almost all this economy based on investing the money of pension funds in ever-growing pointless expenses to sustain an ever-growing debt).

This is not only the case in the USA. Many european countries, including Switzerland, have given the management of pension funds to private companies like Blackrock... despite their disastrous performance (investment funds and the companies where they invest make fortunes, but their clients are not so lucky).

Now, maybe, you can see how much it makes sense to more wisely selecting the people you trust.

Whoever is at the switch (promoting this recurring poor monetary allocation), you are doing it wrong. Wrong for encouraging a community of technically-weak players to consider competence as a nuisance, and for deceiving the taxpayer by promoting and selling the worse possible products – at the expense of investors, and end-users.

How competent and trustworthy are Per Buer (Varnish, quoted on 64 Wikipedia pages), Willy Tarreau (HAProxy CEO, quoted on 35 Wikipedia pages) or William Woodruff (Trail of Bits CTO, quoted on 5 Wikipedia pages) and their well-funded/promoted peers in comparison to G-WAN and SLIMalloc (that Varnish, HAProxy and Trail Of Bits have to denigrate and censor to keep pretending that they deserve our money)?

• no Web/cache/proxy/application servers made significant progress,
• on a 10x faster CPU NGINX is slower in 2025 than G-WAN in 2012,
• and G-WAN 2025 is several orders of magnitude faster than in 2012.

The Varnish/HAProxy/NGINX lies are so recurring and caricatural that it all looks like theater: the best is censored, and NGINX is sold $670m in 2019 (at the expenses of pension funds!).

The level of financial and scientific fraud is absolutely striking. And the taxpayer fits the bills to pay for their ever-growing expenses and extravagances.

Yet, the impunity is total, and the worse players are endlessly funded to make bad products and denigrate the very best.

According to the "Jarrod" benchmark commented by Willy Tarreau, G-WAN was much faster in 2012 on a 8-Core CPU than all the new servers he tested in 2016 on a dual-CPU 12-Core machine (5 years later).

The second time, G-WAN was not tested because, surprise-surprise, "Jarrod" wrote that G-WAN was crashing (thanks to a constant stream of gratuitous changes injected by OS patches and updates).

Further, Cloud revenues would obviously suffer if all their buyers had found that both the OS and the HTTP servers can be made several orders of magnitude faster and safer (making self-hosting a far more attractive option, finally).

For the OS vendors (which, coincidentally, are often also Cloud vendors), it was unacceptable to let the readers link the dots. An alternative explanation was needed. That's why Willy Tarreau falsely asserted that G-WAN (while in reality that was INTEL)... "as a server vendor they have zero excuse for doing these huge mistakes! I thought they were doing serious stuff now I have the proof that they don't know what they're talking about when it comes to performance, which they claim is their main differenciator".

There's something rotten in all the financed industry: too much money consistently going to the wrong persons, for the worse reasons:

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don't have brains enough to be honest.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

I have presented some useful information about the I.T. industry, and shared rare knowledge acquired first-hand, the hard way. I hope that you are now able to see how and why there are two distinct classes of people, why and how they are different in nature, and why the promotion of good works is so rare that nobody can find them.

I have been working for more than 45 years in this industry, and I can tell you that this is not accidental. This is a method:

Mushrooms' law:
1. keep them in the dark,
2. cover them with shit,
3. cut them at the knee when they are growing.

The world can be a better place – but only if the constant taxpayer-funded lies are excluded from the equation. I am not alone to have reached the same conclusion, albeit from a different point of view (this is a ZeroHedge.com author). The world is changing.