Last Updated on April 14, 2026
rwasa is billed as a full-featured, high performance, scalable web server designed to compete with the likes of nginx.
It has been built from the ground-up with no external library dependencies entirely in x86_64 assembly language, and is the result of many years’ experience with high volume web environments. In addition to all of the common things you’d expect a modern web server to do, we also include assembly language function hooks ready-made to facilitate Rapid Web Application Server (in Assembler) development.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Entirety hand-written in x86_64 assembly language.
- Faster than nginx for most environments.
- Commercial support available.
- TLS auto-blacklisting for anti-tampering.
- OCSP Stapling by default.
- Randomized Diffie-Hellman safe prime pool.
- Multi-process lockless TLS session resumption cache.
- TLS session cache is encrypted by default.
- Faster dynamic content compression.
- Large-scale FastCGI safely via unix sockets (without hitting EAGAIN).
- Large-scale backpath (aka upstream) safely via unix sockets.
- Simple command-line arguments covers all common configurations.
- Small footprint, no external dependencies.
- Server-side BREACH mitigation.
- HSTS enabled by default.
Website: 2ton.com.au/rwasa
Support:
Developer: Ton Digital
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Related Software
| Web Servers | |
|---|---|
| nginx | Very powerful and efficient web server powering the top web sites |
| Apache | Like nginx, Apache is a hugely popular web server |
| Caddy | Powerful, enterprise-ready web server written in Go |
| Lwan | Experimental, scalable, high performance HTTP server |
| H2O | Optimized HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 server |
| Tengine | Distribution of nginx |
| lighttpd | Fast, compliant and very flexible low memory footprint web server |
| Ferron | Web server optimized for speed, security and efficiency |
| Angie | Scalable web server that was forked from nginx |
| Algernon | Small self-contained pure-Go web server |
| Node.js | Server-side JavaScript environment for network applications |
| Hiawatha | Web server that focuses on security |
| OpenLiteSpeed | Lightweight HTTP server |
| rwasa | Full-featured high performance web server |
| devd | Local web server for developers |
| Cherokee | Fast, flexible and embeddable web server |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

