https

Provides HTTP(s) and WS(s) primitives as Asio composed operations. This is an experimental replacement for Boost::Beast.

Installation

Copy the contents of src into your project then link to Boost::asio. If you're using transport over TLS, then link to OpenSSL::SSL and OpenSSL::Crypto.

Examples

Try out:

• server.cpp
• client_http.cpp
• client_ws_awaitable.cpp
• client_ws_coro.cpp

Build using:

$ cmake ./examples -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
$ cmake --build build --parallel

Unit tests

Build as above. Run using:

$ ./build/tests

Benchmarks

I benchmarked the example server using ab.

I used the following commands for HTTP and HTTPS respectively:

$ ab -A Tommy:Aldridge -n 500000 -c <C> -k http://localhost:8000/ok
$ ab -A Tommy:Aldridge -n 500000 -c <C> -k https://localhost:8000/ok

Note, the example server is single threaded, uses C++20 coroutines and basic authentication. The tests were undertaken on an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU @ 2.60GHz 12 core processor. I'm using gcc 13.1.0 and openssl 3.0.2.

Transport	Connections	Requests / s
TCP	1	49299.87
TCP	2	86850.14
TCP	5	102857.48
TCP	10	111504.62
TLS	1	33671.01
TLS	2	62024.36
TLS	5	70269.52
TLS	10	78444.07

Not bad.

Roadmap

• Chunked encoding
• Documentation

Questions

• Q: Why not use Beast?

  A: I find Beast bloated and unecessarily complicated. HTTP1 and WS are simple protocols. There is SO MUCH source code in Beast and I'm not convinced it's proportionate.

• Q: Why are you not writing the base library Sans-IO?

  A: Because I'm only going to use this with Asio. I don't mind having state-machine logic inside an Asio composed operation rather than something custom. As far as I can tell, the only motivation for Sans-IO is unit tests.