From Sockets to Server: What I Learned Building My Own Web Server

1) The Question That Started It Most of us use web servers through frameworks that hide the hard parts. You define routes, deploy, and move on. I wanted to understand what happens underneath. So I built an HTTP server in C++ from scratch—starting with POSIX sockets, then layering parsing, routing, static file serving, and concurrency. No frameworks. Just syscalls, buffers, and edge cases. The project quickly turned into something more specific: If I build the HTTP stack myself, where does perfor