Boa: an Embedded Web Server

Most of the world thinks of a web server as something on the Internet that can help find a football score, access a bank account or find an airplane flight. That's well and good but, in the embedded world, there are lots of places where a web server could come in handy. A common example is a network-connected printer. Being able to inquire about the status of the printer is useful, and if a small enough web server is available, it could offer a convenient interface.

This isn't just theory. Tektronics, for example, includes a web server in its 780 color laser printer. Their server allows you to configure the printer, access documentation, inquire about printer status--including toner levels--and includes links for ordering supplies. I am sure the cost of the web server is offset by supplies revenue and decreased support costs.

The most popular web server for traditional web sites is Apache. Apache is full-featured, very configurable and very reliable. It has proven itself in the general-purpose web server market and has been adopted by major players, including IBM.

Apache's design requires it to spawn (fork and exec) a separate task for each simultaneous connection. This is not necessarily a bad design, but in the embedded world, it is likely that you will need something that uses fewer resources--an average memory footprint in the tens of thousands of bytes rather than in the megabytes, for example.

Boa is a tiny web server that also offers extremely high performance. It is specifically designed to run on UNIX-like systems, which includes Linux, as well as the *BSD systems. To get all the legal stuff out of the way, Boa is available for free and is covered by the GNU Public License (GPL). The source code for Boa, as well as documentation, can be found at http://www.boa.org/.

The following point taken from the Boa web site shows why I have decided to write about Boa:

Unlike traditional web servers, Boa is single-tasking. What this means is that it internally multiplexes all of the ongoing HTTP connections rather than the more traditional forking of multiple copies for each connection. It must, of course, fork separate processes to execute CGI scripts, but that is well defined and under the control of the system designer.

My use of Boa has been to handle very low-volume HTTP connections on the order of a few hundred to a few thousand pages served per day. The Boa web page, however, claims that tests show Boa capable of handling several thousand hits per second on a 300MHz Pentium and dozens of hits per second on a 20MHz 386/SX. Thus, for most applications, it's unlikely that performance is going to be an issue.

Of course, in an embedded application, it is likely that the primary job of the processor will be handling something other than running a web server. What this means is that running Boa is not likely to significantly decrease the resources available for the primary purpose of the embedded CPU.

This small size and high performance doesn't come for free. However, what Boa doesn't do generally woudn't be missed for an embedded system. Here is the short list:

Because Boa is so compact, it is also very easy to install and configure. The details are on the Boa web site, but if you are familiar with installing typical tarballs, Boa will be no surprise. The basic steps are:

That's it. You should have a working version of Boa. Point your web browser at it and see what happens. If it doesn't work, check the error_log file.