Zeus Web Server

» see zeus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1995 you could still sell somebody a web server. Zeus Technology was founded that year out of Churchill College, Cambridge, by two undergraduates named Damian Reeves and Adam Twiss, and the product they built was a web server for Unix written around a single idea: be faster than everything else. It ran on Solaris, on FreeBSD, on HP-UX, on Linux. It was proprietary and it cost money, and in 1995 that was not yet an obviously losing position.

For a decade Zeus was genuinely the fastest thing available. Hardware vendors submitting SPECweb99 benchmark results for their machines used it, because the point of those submissions was to make the hardware look good and Zeus was the software least likely to be the bottleneck. During 2001 and 2002 it ran close to 3% of the world's websites. For much of 2003 the Netcraft survey put it third, behind Apache and Microsoft IIS and ahead of everything else with a name.

Third place on that chart is a smaller thing than it sounds. Apache was most of the web and IIS was most of the rest, so third meant a couple of points, and the company never got much past that. By April 2006 the share was around 0.7%. On 10 June 2008 the company dropped support for AIX and for Tru64, and for Mac OS X on the same day. By then no top hardware performer was submitting SPECweb2005 results on it either. The last release came in January 2010, and then nothing.

Riverbed Technology bought Zeus Technology in July 2011 for $110 million, and what they were buying was Zeus Traffic Manager, the software load balancer the company had built in 2004 and which became Stingray. The web server came along as a line item. Riverbed kept the support contract open until 30 november 2014 and then closed it. I have spent my working life around Linux boxes and I have never once typed the word zeus into a config file. In Turkey the web server question had exactly one answer, and the answer was free.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The technical case was real and it was not marketing. Zeus was built around an event-driven model at a time when Apache was still forking a process per connection, which is the same architectural argument nginx would win with a decade later. On a machine with a fixed amount of memory, that difference showed up immediately under load, and load was exactly what the benchmark submissions measured.

The company understood that its customers were already running something else, so it built for migration rather than conversion. Zeus read .htaccess files. It had a URL rewriting system deliberately shaped like Apache's mod_rewrite. It supported NSAPI and ISAPI so you could move off Netscape's server or off IIS without rewriting your extensions. The pitch was not that you should start on Zeus. The pitch was that you would start on Apache, get popular, and then need this.

~ the fall ~

What killed it was that the second half of that pitch stopped being true. Hardware got cheaper faster than traffic grew, and the sites that did outgrow one Apache box learned to put ten of them behind a load balancer instead of buying a faster server. Zeus Technology noticed this before its customers did, which is why the load balancer became the real business and why Riverbed paid $110 million for a company whose famous product was the one they were not interested in.

There is a small joke buried in the source tree of the thing that beat it. Adam Twiss wrote a benchmarking tool called ZeusBench to prove his server was faster than Apache. That tool was adapted into ApacheBench, and ab still ships with Apache today. If you have ever run a quick load test on a web server, you have probably used a direct descendant of the program written to embarrass Apache.

~ the next chapter ~

The load balancer had a longer afterlife than the server and a stranger one. Riverbed sold the SteelApp unit to Brocade in March 2015, four months after switching Zeus Web Server off. Brocade then sold the vADC business on to Pulse Secure in June 2017, and Pulse Secure was itself swallowed by Ivanti in December 2020. Code that two Cambridge students wrote in the mid nineties has now been owned by five companies and carries a name that has nothing to do with any of them.

The commercial web server as a category did not survive either. iPlanet went the same way, Netscape's server line dissolved into Sun and then Oracle, and IIS only persists because it comes with the operating system. Nobody sells you the program that answers port 80 anymore. They sell you the machine it runs on, by the hour.

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