brighttpd

brighttpd is a small and fast static file server that uses Linux kernel toys like io_uring, splice, and kTLS.

getting started

make
mkdir -p www

umask 077
cat > brighttpd.conf <<'EOF'
listen [::]:8080
root www
EOF

./brighttpd -c brighttpd.conf -n
./brighttpd -c brighttpd.conf

features

• static file root is indexed at startup; missing index.html and 404.html fall back to pages embedded into the binary.
• GET and HEAD over HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1, with keep-alive and single range queries.
• io_uring accept/recv/send/read/splice/poll/timeout loop with fixed-file registration.
• buffered reads for small files, splice for larger plain HTTP responses, kTLS sendfile path for TLS.
• PKCS#12 TLS config, optional HTTP-to-HTTPS 308 redirects.
• privilege drop, capability clearing, PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS, always-on seccomp, and connection timeouts.

benchmarks

ran with make bench and make bench-tls on 2026-04-29. machine: Alpine edge, Linux 6.18.26-0-lts, Intel i3-N305, 8GiB LPDDR5. each benchmark used wrk --latency for 10 seconds on localhost.

mixed means 90 percent /small, 9 percent /medium, and 1 percent /big. charts show actual req/s on one shared axis. HTTP and TLS are split into separate charts.

http req/s

tls req/s

http results

tls results