June 14, 2026
Fast server, furious comments
Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency
A speed monster arrives, and the comments instantly turn into a nerd fight
TLDR: zeroserve says it can run Caddy-style website setups much faster than Caddy, with far lower wait times and less memory use. Commenters were impressed, but the real debate was whether anyone needed this speed boost in the first place — and whether missing easy certificate support kills the hype.
A new web server called zeroserve just rolled into town claiming 3x the speed and about 70% lower delay than Caddy in testing, and the internet reacted exactly how you’d hope: with awe, skepticism, and a tiny identity crisis. The big pitch is simple enough for normal humans: you can feed it a Caddy config file, and it turns that into ultra-fast machine instructions so websites can respond quicker while using less memory. On paper, that’s a huge flex.
But the real action was in the comments, where the crowd immediately split into camps. One person was pure hype mode — basically, drop everything, I need to try this today. Another delivered the cold shower: has Caddy ever actually been the thing slowing anyone down? That became the thread’s central mood. Sure, the benchmark numbers look spicy, but some readers clearly wondered whether this is solving a real-world pain point or just winning the geek Olympics.
Then came the side quests. One commenter was genuinely shocked that nginx, the old warhorse of web servers, still kept up so well. Another launched a mini philosophical debate over whether eBPF — a low-level Linux tech — is really “Turing-complete,” which is the kind of extremely-online argument that tells you the nerds have arrived. And the loudest practical complaint? No ACME support, meaning no built-in easy HTTPS certificates. For one reader, that was an instant dealbreaker. So yes: the speed brag landed, but the comments turned it into a drama about usefulness, missing features, and whether this is genius or just glorified benchmark bait.
Key Points
- •zeroserve introduced a Caddy compatibility mode that accepts a Caddyfile and compiles it via eBPF to native x86_64 or ARM64 code.
- •The compiled configuration runs inside an io_uring event loop as part of zeroserve’s execution model.
- •In the published HTTPS reverse-proxy benchmark on 2 threads and an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, `zeroserve-clang` reached 38,948 req/s versus Caddy’s 12,529 req/s.
- •The same benchmark showed lower latency for zeroserve than Caddy, with `zeroserve-clang` at 1.45 ms versus Caddy at 4.74 ms, alongside lower memory use.
- •The article includes instructions for running zeroserve with an existing Caddyfile and shows a plugin example that signs S3-compatible requests using AWS SigV4 before reverse proxying.