Cutelyst 1.1.2 released
Cutelyst the C++/Qt Web Framework just got a new release.
Yesterday I was going to do the 1.1.0 release, after running tests, and being happy with current state I wrote this blog post, but before I publish I went to www.cutelyst.org CMS (CMlyst) to paste the same post, and I got hit by a bug I had on 1.0.0, which at time I thought it was a bug in CMlyst, so decided to investigate and found a few other bugs with our WSGI not properly changing the current directory and not replacing the + sign with an ' ' space when parsing formdata, which was the main bug. So did the fixes tagged as 1.1.1 and today found that automatically setting Content-Length wasn't working when the View rendered nothing.
Cutelyst Core and Plugins API/ABI are stable but Cutelyst-WSGI had to have changes, I forgot to expose the needed API for it to actually be useful outside Cutelyst so this isn't a problem (nobody would be able to use it anyway). So API stability got extended to all components now.
Thanks to a KDAB video about perf I finally managed to use it and was able to detect two slow code paths in Cutelyst-WSGI.
The first and that was causing 7% overhead was due QTcpSocket emitting readyRead() signal and in the HttpParser code I was calling sender() to get the socket, turns out the sender() method implementation is not as simple as I thought it was and there is a QMutexLocker which maybe caused some thread to wait on it (not sure really), so now for each QTcpSocket there is an HttpParser class, this uses a little more memory but the code got faster. Hopefully in Qt6 the signal can have a readyRead(QIODevice *) signature.
The second was that I end up using QByteArrayMatcher to match \r\n to get request headers, perl was showing it was causing 1.2% overhead, doing some benchmarks I replaced it by a code that was faster. Using a single thread on my Intel I5 I can process 85k req/s, so things got indeed a little faster.
It got a contribution from a new developer on View::Email, which made me do a new simplemail-qt release (1.3.0), the code there still needs love regarding performance but I didn't manage to find time to improve it yet.
This new release has some new features:
- EPoll event loop was added to Linux builds, this is supposedly to be faster than default GLib but I couldn't measure the difference properly, this is optional and requires CUTELYST_EVENT_LOOP_EPOLL=1 environment to be set.
- ViewEmail got methods to set/get authentication method and connection type
- WSGI: can now set TCP_NODELAY, TCP KEEPALIVE, SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF on command line, these use the same name as in uwsgi
- Documentation was improved a bit and can be generated now with make docs, which doesn't require me to changing Cutelyst version manually anymore
And also some important bug fixes:
- Lazy evaluation of Request methods was broken on 1.0.0
- WSGI: Fixed loading configs and parsing command line option
Download https://github.com/cutelyst/cutelyst/archive/r1.1.2.tar.gz and have fun!