[nostrademons]

That's bullshit that got written into Wikipedia and then repeated frequently. I worked on that proprietary webserver; it's absolutely nothing like Apache. (When I left, it was like basically no other program I'd ever seen before - it was a frankenbinary written in C++, Java, and two proprietary programming languages. Oldest continually-pushed binary at Google; it's been gradually evolved since Craig Silverstein first wrote it in 1999, and never completely rewritten.)

BTW, the Medusa-based webserver I mentioned was gone by 1999; it was the prototype that Larry, Sergey, Scott Hassan, and Craig Silverstein did when Google was still a Stanford research project.

[markpapadakis]

Thanks Jonathan. Why did Google chose to build its own proprietary web server? Was there a specific requirement or need that Apache or other alternatives couldn't support? I suspect around that time the first event-based (async I/O /w connection multiplexing) web server was Zeus, which was commercial and likely not worth looking into it and soon thereafter there was Lighting HTTPD or whatever it's called. Did you want to, perhaps, implement your own similar design, optimised for your use cases, without having to say, pay, for Zeus?