Boa
Welcome to your personal documentation for Boa, a high performance
web server for Unix-alike computers, covered by the
Gnu General Public License.  The current
release is boa-0.92.  The on-line, updated copy of this documentation
lives at www.boa.org.
Boa is a single-tasking HTTP server.  That means that unlike
traditional web servers, it does not fork for each incoming
connection, nor does it fork many copies of itself to handle multiple
connections.  It internally multiplexes all of the ongoing HTTP
connections, and forks only for CGI programs (which must be separate
processes.)  Preliminary tests show boa is about twice as fast as
Apache, and is capable of
handling 50 hits per second on a 66 MHz '486.
The primary design goals of Boa are speed and security.  Security,
in the sense of "can't be subverted by a malicious user", not
"fine grained access control and encrypted communications".
Boa is not intended as a feature-packed server; if you want one of those,
check out WN from John Franks.
Modifications to Boa that improve its speed, security, robustness, and
portability, are eagerly sought.  Other features may be added if they
can be achieved without hurting the primary goals.
Boa was created by Paul Phillips <psp@well.com>.
It is now being maintained and enhanced by Larry Doolittle
<ldoolitt@boa.org>.  Other possible contact people are
Charles F. Randall (lost), and Jon Nelson <jnelson@boa.org>.
Linux is the development platform at the moment, other OS's are
known to work.  If you'd like to contribute to this effort, contact
Larry or Jon via e-mail.
More information:
Installation and Usage
Performance limits and design philosophy
Differences between Boa and other web servers
Possible bugs
Possible unexpected behavior
Possible improvements
License
Acknowledgments
Logos
Bibliography
(historical) Paul Phillips' README for release 0.91
Last update: 20 December, 1996
Larry Doolittle