lpereira/lwan

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

6034 stars · 552 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Lwan is a high-performance, scalable HTTP server written in C that can serve both static and dynamic content, and can also be embedded as a library. It uses coroutines with a per-CPU cooperative scheduler and has very low memory and disk footprints, making it suitable from embedded devices to robust servers.

Use cases

• serve static files with a lightweight high-performance web server
• embed an HTTP server into a C application as a library
• write dynamic web handlers in C or Lua
• run a web server on embedded or resource-constrained devices
• benchmark and study high-performance HTTP server design
• serve precompressed content with gzip, zstd, or Brotli

When to choose

• you need extremely low memory and disk footprint
• you want a small, readable C codebase to learn from or embed
• you need high requests-per-second throughput with low latency
• you want to write handlers in C or Lua with coroutine-based I/O

When to avoid

• you need a feature-rich server with extensive module ecosystems like nginx or Apache
• you require long-term production stability guarantees
• you need first-class Windows support
• you prefer not to work with GPL-2.0 licensing or C-level development

Facets

application · maturity experimental

http-server web-framework routing templating web-development backend performance developer-tools bsd c cli self-hosted high-performance coroutines embedded http static-file-serving lua-scripting lightweight linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="lpereira/lwan")