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I am proud to announce the first alpha release of Medusa.

Medusa is a 'server platform' - it provides a framework for
implementing asynchronous socket-based servers (tcp/ip and on unix,
unix domain sockets).

An asynchronous socket server is a server that can communicate with
many other socket clients and servers simultaneously, by multiplexing
I/O within a single process/thread.  In the context of an HTTP server,
this means a single process can serve hundreds or even thousands of
clients, depending only on the operating system's configuration and
limitations.

There are several advantages to this approach:
     
  o  performance - no fork() or thread() start-up costs per hit.

  o  scalability - the overhead per client can be kept rather small,
     on the order of several kilobytes of memory.

  o  persistence - a single-process server can easily coordinate the
     actions of several different connections.  This makes things like
     proxy servers and gateways easy to implement.  It also makes it
     possible to share resources like database handles.

This first release of Medusa includes HTTP, FTP, and 'monitor' (remote
python interpreter) servers.  Medusa can simultaneously support
several instances of either the same or different server types - for
example you could start up two HTTP servers, an FTP server, and a
monitor server.  Then you could connect to the monitor server to
control and manipulate medusa while it is running.

Other servers and clients have been written (SMTP, POP3, NNTP), and
several are in the planning stages.  [One particularly interesting
side-project is an integrated asynchronous mSQL client.]

I am distributing Medusa under a 'free for non-commercial use'
license.  Python source code is included.

Medusa has not yet been placed under a 'real-world' load, such an
environment is difficult to simulate.  I am very interested in all
feedback about Medusa's performance, but especially so for high-load
situations (greater than 1 hit/sec).

More information is available at:

  http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/

- -Sam
rushing@nightmare.com

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