Port osrm-routed to use boost::beast by TheMarex · Pull Request #7328 · Project-OSRM/osrm-backend

TheMarex · 2026-01-12T15:42:35Z

Issue

We have long discussed sun-setting osrm-routed in favor of osrm-routed.js. (see #6411 and #3832). Now having written #3832 9 years ago, it is time to reflect if that was such a good idea.

osrm-routed is still around a most people use it inside a docker container behind some kind of HTTP proxy.
API-layers use a lot of different technologies, depending on NodeJS was mostly based on the MBX preferences at the time.

It is clear the current HTTP code is not great, but there are some good options in C++ land that are really mature and more then enough for a standalone HTTP server. For example boost::beast which makes a lot of sense since we use boost::asio anyway.

Thanks to our new AI overlords that transition was relatively smooth with some hand-holding. I've done some benchmarks and I think we should drop the NodeJS path in favor of this. It's pretty clear that we have some issues with initial connection setup, the new beast-based implementation is dramatically faster if we are not saturated.

We need 128 concurrent connections to saturate my machine (4 cores, 8 threads) with the baseline implementation, we can do the same with far fewer connections using the new beast implementation. This is random MLD P2P queries on Bavaria.

Tasklist

CHANGELOG.md entry (How to write a changelog entry)
update relevant Wiki pages
add tests (see testing documentation)
review
adjust for comments

Requirements / Relations

Link any requirements here. Other pull requests this PR is based on?

Copilot

Pull request overview

This PR ports the osrm-routed HTTP server from a custom HTTP parser implementation to use Boost.Beast, a modern HTTP library that's part of Boost. This is a significant modernization of the HTTP stack.

Changes:

Replaces custom HTTP parser with Boost.Beast HTTP implementation
Migrates from custom request/reply structures to Beast's native HTTP types
Updates connection handling to use Beast's tcp_stream with built-in timeout support
Simplifies server acceptor logic using Beast patterns

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 13 out of 13 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
src/server/request_parser.cpp	Removed - custom HTTP parser no longer needed
src/server/http/reply.cpp	Removed - replaced by Beast response types
include/server/request_parser.hpp	Removed - custom parser header
include/server/http/request.hpp	Removed - replaced by Beast request types
include/server/http/reply.hpp	Removed - replaced by Beast response types
include/server/http/header.hpp	Removed - Beast handles headers natively
src/server/request_handler.cpp	Updated to use Beast request/response types and extract headers using Beast API
src/server/connection.cpp	Rewritten to use Beast's async I/O with tcp_stream for connection management
include/server/connection.hpp	Updated with Beast types and modern connection handling
include/server/request_handler.hpp	Updated type aliases to use Beast types
include/server/server.hpp	Refactored acceptor logic to use Beast patterns and added enable_shared_from_this
fuzz/request_parser.cc	Updated fuzzer to use Beast's HTTP parser
CMakeLists.txt	Added Boost version checks for Beast compatibility

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DennisOSRM · 2026-01-12T20:43:08Z

That's a fascinating change. Thanks for preparing the insightful experiments.

DennisOSRM · 2026-01-14T06:46:11Z

Looks like there's a segfault happening:

Error: osrm-routed killed by signal SIGSEGV: /home/runner/work/osrm-backend/osrm-backend/build-osrm/osrm-routed --dataset-name=cucumber -s -i 127.0.0.1 -p 5000 -a CH

TheMarex · 2026-01-15T16:23:03Z

Well this took a while to debug (only crashed every few thousand osrm-routed restarts...) but found the issue in a race condition between closing the request acceptor and accepting new requests. This should be ready to go now if all the tests pass.

Copilot

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 13 out of 13 changed files in this pull request and generated 3 comments.

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Co-authored-by: Copilot <175728472+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

…ync()

Co-authored-by: Copilot <175728472+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

TheMarex · 2026-01-18T15:59:21Z

This is ready now.

DennisOSRM · 2026-01-18T16:02:43Z

                                                short keepalive_timeout)
    {
-        util::Log() << "http 1.1 compression handled by zlib version " << zlibVersion();
+        util::Log() << "HTTP/1.1 server using Boost.Beast, compression by zlib " << zlibVersion();


No blocker, but I could imagine this might break a few folks pragmatic uptime monitoring.

I would hope they would at least check for [info] running and waiting for requests instead. 😆

MarcelloPerathoner · 2026-01-19T21:57:28Z

I'm afraid we have memory leaks:
lsan.log

TheMarex · 2026-01-20T14:14:47Z

Are they new though? I can maybe squeeze in some time this week to take a closer look, might just be some shared_ptr stuff leaking somehow. Most of our memory usage is static so with enough requests we should see something more obvious pop up.

MarcelloPerathoner · 2026-01-20T15:33:28Z

They are new since a few days ago. I have a debug-asan task running in my private repo, failing now.

danpat · 2026-01-20T22:17:48Z

@TheMarex another thing to mention: a while back, @SiarheiFedartsou tried basically the same and we ended up reverting it, see #6407

IIRC the main issue was that the boost::beast HTTP parser had some upper limit on the GET request size it would accept, and this broke quite a few users making very large GET /table requests. There's some discussion in the linked PR above.

TheMarex · 2026-01-21T11:10:46Z

@danpat Haha, nothing new under the sun. 😆 Well, fortunately this is actually configurable in 2026 with the less obviously named header_limit on the request parser. The current limit works for the large test cases we configured in cucumber (that is how I discovered it) and should be the upper limit of what other HTTP servers would allow, but maybe we should make it configurable for running locally.

I'll prepare a separate PR for that, I think we can make this seamless by defaulting to some number derived from the coordinate limits.

TheMarex · 2026-01-21T14:33:46Z

@MarcelloPerathoner Took a quick look at it, seems harmless since essentially the root cause is that the std::shared_ptr<Server> has ref count > 1 when it is supposed to be deallocated cleanly on shutdown. Looks like we have some lingering reference in the connection pool or something, I'll dive deeper to make sure we shutdown cleanly. But there should not be any real memory leak - at least running it with a memory profiler for an extensive period did not increase the memory usage.

TheMarex requested a review from Copilot January 12, 2026 15:42

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TheMarex force-pushed the patrick/use_boost_beast branch 3 times, most recently from 9a611b3 to c1d9c9f Compare January 13, 2026 22:08

TheMarex force-pushed the patrick/use_boost_beast branch 2 times, most recently from 51cef1a to 9f31063 Compare January 15, 2026 16:21

TheMarex requested a review from Copilot January 15, 2026 16:23

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Comment thread src/server/request_handler.cpp Outdated

Comment thread include/server/connection.hpp Outdated

Comment thread src/server/connection.cpp Outdated

DennisOSRM reviewed Jan 15, 2026

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Comment thread CMakeLists.txt Outdated

TheMarex force-pushed the patrick/use_boost_beast branch from 03e933b to 61cf71e Compare January 18, 2026 13:46

TheMarex and others added 14 commits January 18, 2026 16:14

Port the osrm-routed server to boost-beast

8aa1684

Remove custom HTTP types

2e0d336

Update src/server/connection.cpp

b32001f

Co-authored-by: Copilot <175728472+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

Stylistic fixes

1db9a9e

Fix formating

50bcc3f

Fix the error on CTRL+R

a04f94c

Use modern timestamp logging

ed5489c

Fix the max header size

f1f9577

Handle race condition between acceptor.close() and acceptor.accept_as…

728f4ee

…ync()

Refactor SetInternalServerError

e435782

Fix use-after-move (clang-tidy)

459ad6b

Fix use-after-move (clang-tidy)

7f5beee

Ignore return shutdown() value on old boost versions

10019a4

Fix copy-instead-of-ref (clang-tidy)

42f38ab

TheMarex and others added 5 commits January 18, 2026 16:14

Fix unused-return-value (clang-tidy)

2081437

Update clang-tidy config to work with version 21

b603f39

Fix formating

fa01868

Fix spelling/grammar mistakes

9a60da9

Co-authored-by: Copilot <175728472+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

Require boost 1.70

2688a07

TheMarex force-pushed the patrick/use_boost_beast branch from bfa817c to 2688a07 Compare January 18, 2026 15:14

TheMarex requested a review from DennisOSRM January 18, 2026 15:59

DennisOSRM approved these changes Jan 18, 2026

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Add new changelog entry

034887b

TheMarex force-pushed the patrick/use_boost_beast branch from 5ca7321 to 034887b Compare January 18, 2026 16:06

TheMarex merged commit f5d5790 into master Jan 18, 2026
19 checks passed

TheMarex deleted the patrick/use_boost_beast branch January 18, 2026 16:39

TheMarex mentioned this pull request Jan 21, 2026

Make maximum header size configurable #7336

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TheMarex mentioned this pull request Jan 21, 2026

Use weak_ptr and wait for shutdown #7337

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TheMarex commented Jan 12, 2026 •

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