Building a reverse proxy

Question

I'm building a reverse proxy from scratch. The requirements are:

1) Super scalable. It must handle a lot of concurrent requests (also streaming, 1000 request/second would be a good performance in my case)
2) Super fast (non blocking).
3) No C/C++ or Erlang
4) Easy to mantain - even if it was, Assembly is not an option :)

After some research, most of people suggests using node.js or Scala - what do you think is the best solution for this kind of job? Which technologies would you use to build this kind of proxy?

Thanks

Super scalable and fast is not a very clear requirement. Do you have a more quantifiable use case? — Tobu, Jun 23 '11 at 23:00
node.js can handle it. I don't really know the advantages of node.js vs Scala but I like node so that's got my vote ;) — Raynos, Jun 23 '11 at 23:04
There are some pretty good high-performance reverse proxies out there all ready... Nginx, HAProxy etc. What does yours need to do that they don't? — nicolaskruchten, Jun 24 '11 at 01:55

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

Personally I'd try out this guy first.

Just to expound a bit, people who said "try node.js or Scala" are slightly misguided in that Scala—like Java—is just a programming language, whereas node.js is most of a platform. Apart from its general advantages, the main things Scala brings to the table for this kind of project are:

A juicy bit of syntax that makes it easier to write actor systems as libraries, namely PartialFunction "literals":

trait NeedsAPF {
  def pf: PartialFunction[Any,Unit]
}

object PFHaver extends NeedsAPF {
  def pf = {
    case i: Int => println("I got an int and it was " + i)
  }
}

When you're ready for it, a continuations plugin, which lets you write code that looks synchronous, but can be asynchronous under the covers.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 24 '11 at 04:42

I'd take a look at: https://github.com/nodejitsu/node-http-proxy as it satisfies all of your requirements. I'm not sure why there's a need to build it from scratch, but I suppose if you decide to build it in node, you can certainly at least take inspiration from this.

score -1 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 24 '11 at 02:11

Scala should be good enough, but you'll need to use NIO a lot, which means you'll probably be in close contact with Java's NIO library. I don't know if any of the libraries available in Scala will help you in this, but, then again, it's your job to look it up, not mine. :-)

Building a reverse proxy

3 Answers3