This change boosts SSL handshake performance from 2,627 to ~10,000 per
second which is the same level of performance as NGINX at establishing
secure connections. That's impressive if we consider that redbean is a
forking frontend application server. This was accomplished by:
1. Enabling either SSL session caching or SSL tickets. We choose to
use tickets since they reduce network round trips too and that's
a more important metric than wrk'ing localhost.
2. Fixing mbedtls_mpi_sub_abs() which is the most frequently called
function. It's called about 12,000 times during an SSL handshake
since it's the basis of most arithmetic operations like addition
and for some strange reason it was designed to make two needless
copies in addition to calling malloc and free. That's now fixed.
3. Improving TLS output buffering during the SSL handshake only, so
that only a single is write and read system call is needed until
blocking on the ping pong.
redbean will now do a better job wiping sensitive memory from a child
process as soon as it's not needed. The nice thing about fork is it's
much faster than reverse proxying so the goal is to use the different
address spaces along with setuid() to minimize the risk that a server
key will be compromised in the event that application code is hacked.
A new rollup tool now exists for flattening out the headers in a way
that works better for our purposes than cpp. A lot of the API clutter
has been removed. APIs that aren't a sure thing in terms of general
recommendation are now marked internal.
There's now a smoke test for the amalgamation archive and gigantic
header file. So we can now guarantee you can use this project on the
easiest difficulty setting without the gigantic repository.
A website is being created, which is currently a work in progress:
https://justine.storage.googleapis.com/cosmopolitan/index.html
