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)

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.

Then, G-WAN and my paper have trigggered two opposite reactions: a genuine enthousiasm of people thanking me (the kind presumably sharing my needs) – and a jihad of sabotage, censorship and denigration (from... the authors of the sorry state of things):

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 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 foreseable 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 language runtimes) designed to work only as shared libraries.

Is really the taxpayer happy to see his own money used against him? Would they continue funding the ones betraying him if they had the choice? Certainly not – and that's why the taxpayer is not given a voice about where his money goes!

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 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 half-backed kernel features like epoll(7), aio(7) or io_uring (praised for merely delivering 10% gains in corner cases) resulted from sheer incompetence, or from a plan to waste even more of people's time and increase their learned helplessness.

G-WAN has made this giant leap in performance, durability and security by questioning the operating system – and by avoidng 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 blackmail and crookery). 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 against the crooks.

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 crookery: 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 or 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).

It is worth noting that this tactic used to deceive 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 – these values designed to let people live together (you shall not murder, steal, lie, etc.) instead of constantly 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 (instead of seizing an opportunity to learn) anyone doing better.

This same scam rules all the domains of our society (a toxic placebo is sold as a false cure to an artificially created problem).

From time to time, the scam it exposed for what it is, when headless chicken "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 other unfair 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 software, why not do it to humans?

The most sneaky ones pick an inactive or retired target (a kind that rarely retaliates) feeling that they are immune from 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 and (2) misplaced, it is also totally (3) gratuitous (G-WAN did not compete with HAProxy). But the delay between the questions and answers is odd: 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 competent and trustworthy are Per Buer (Varnish.com CEO), Willy Tarreau (HAProxy.com CEO) or William Woodruff (TrailOfBits.com CTO) and their well-funded peers (promoted by Wikipedia and the GAFAM) in comparison to G-WAN (denigrated and censored)?

• no Web/cache/proxy/application servers made significant progress,
• sold $670m in 2019, Nginx is slower in 2025 than G-WAN 2012,
• G-WAN 2025 is several orders of magnitude faster than in 2012.

It is so caricatural that it all looks like theater.

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

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

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 theere 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.