It is designed to achieve high performance under high loads by making the most of the Linux kernel in terms of specific system calls and optimization techniques.
It is HTTP/1.1 compliant (RFC 2616) and supports common features such as IPv6, TLS, Virtual Hosts, CGI, FastCGI, Directory Listing, and Security Rules.
The server is designed as a small core extensible through its plugin interface.
Monkey can perform well on x86 and x86-64, and ARM architectures running Linux embedded variants.
Monkey was started in 2001 as an open source project.