I recently ran into gwan (http://gwan.ch) a free web server that according to many seem to be frightfully fast. I am not very keen on the C based scripting but I wanted to use it to serve static contents. I did see a thread in ./ on using gwan
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/29/2133243/g-wan-another-free-web-server
Anybody with real world experience in running gwan in production? Any best practices ?
I am not very keen on the C based scripting
G-WAN offers scripts in Java, Scala, PH7, Go, Perl, Python, Ruby, C++, C#, D and Objective-C (not only C).
Anybody with real world experience in running gwan in production?
We do (I am part of the G-WAN team) but for more than 3 years now we have registered (and non-registered) users who ask us advices about how to better tune G-WAN for their needs, or how to develop G-WAN scripts or handlers.
They range from 'old' traditional business like accounting (service provider) or yellow-pages to cutting-edge Web application like trading or online-games.
Recently there is a new interest to involve G-WAN for huge distributed databases - something that G-WAN was created for (as we use it for Global-WAN).
Any best practices ?
This is a too broad question to be answered in a couple of lines.
Don't try to duplicate what you were doing with other servers: there's usually a much simpler way to do things with G-WAN (example of this are the FLV and rewrite handler examples published here).
Try to keep things simple. You always win by respecting this rule.