The basic W3 server: Internals

This describes the generic hypertext daemon (server) program. The daemon is part of the WWW project. See also:

User guide .
Bugs and Features
Other servers

The hypertext daemon, like the ftp daemon, is a program which responds to an incomming tcp connection and provides a service to the caller.

Sources

A compilation option (SELECT) controls whether more than one connection can be handled at a time. This is a function of whether the TCP/IP implementation beneath the application has a working "select()" routine. If it is not true, this implementation services one connection, then drops it before accepting another one. In neither case does the daemon concurrently serve two clients, nor does it fork off a process to do that.

The basic server loop is in the file HTDaemon.c . A separate module ( for example HTRetrieve.c ) contains the code to handle one request. Various specific versions of this may be written for different flavours of server. Also used are various modules of WWW common code.

Tim BL