Open Source C embedded web server supporting SOAP / JSON-RPC based web service and compatible with ARM processor
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4373602
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09-10-2019 - |
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I am working on a project to embed a web server written in C into a device. The requirement is that it should support web services (SOAP / JSON-RPC) and should be compatible with ARM processor. Any suggestions of specific products or where to look first?
Solution
Given your description: Linux based platform with 256MB RAM, you can basically use any web server you like. 256MB RAM takes your device out of the typical embedded territory into server space.
Don't worry about ARM support too much because it is well supported by the Linux community. It is one of the architectures that is officially supported by Debian. I myself run a couple of web servers on ARM running Debian and lighttpd with hardware having only 32MB RAM.
The top three most popular web servers (and popularity is quite important since it means you can easily google if you have a problem):
lighttpd - very light on RAM usage since it is single threaded and very light on CPU usage as well. The disadvantage is that it can be slow to respond if you try to run heavyweight, CPU intensive CGI applications on it since it is single threaded.
Apache2 - heavy on RAM usage. Apache's default operating mode is to keep threads alive as long as possible to handle heavy loads. This means most of the time you use up RAM on sleeping processes. But if you DO need to handle heavy loads this is a good thing. Good for heavy duty CGI apps.
Nginx - the new kid on the block. Not as well documented (at the moment, obviously documentation improves with time) as either lighttpd or Apache but people have been saying that it outperforms both. It is multithreaded like Apache2 but nonblocking like lighttpd so it has the best of both worlds: it uses less RAM that Apache2 (though more than lighttpd) in general and performs at least as well if not better than Apache2 under load. The only real downside for me is the documentation.
