Apache Server Nears 2.0

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Apache httpd project has released a new beta of their apache 2.0 server (v32)". For those who have not been following the 2.0 development, this is the third beta that has been produced. The new version of Apache sports the new APR API and a new method for filtered I/O, and has been rewritten to make use of a hybrid thread/process model. With Covalent already selling a commercial version of 2.0, hopefully we will see a full release of the open source version in the near future.

Comments

Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[blackmateria]

I've been using Apache 2 on Linux and FreeBSD for about 2 months now (got into it while playing around with Subversion, another project that seems to be making excellent progress), and IMHO it is really going to rock the server world. Some major plusses:

• ./configure; make; make install (almost). No more APACI, thankfully.
• APR. It's already starting to be used by other projects.
• Totally rewritten mod_cache, mod_proxy, etc. Works much better now!
• Will actually work on Windows (well, some may not see this as a benefit, but whatever).

People have been complaining that Apache 2 is slow to come out, but from what I've seen lurking on the mailing list, it's because they want to ensure the quality of this release. They've also been talking about how they want a lot of beta testers, because (<rumor mode on>)they want to release soon, maybe even from 2.0.32. So get out there and beta test it!

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Have you crashed Windows XP with a simple printf recently? Try it!

Performance results

[augustz]

I've been following performance results for 2.0, and wanted to let folks know that it doesn't seem clear to me that there is this huge performance gain waiting to happen.

http://webperf.org/a2/v29/Apache2_26-Nov-2001.html has some 2.x v. 1.x results.

Love to hear the lowdown on performance advantages of the new Apache from someone in the know or someone who has done some actual testing.

Also, PHP/Apache perl/Apache integration are probably very high on many folks lists, what is the status of those two vis a vis apache?

Re:Performance results

[Anonymous Coward]

the apache has several performance advantages.

1 lower memory footprint.
you can run a a server which normally took 4G of memory in 512M

2. speed
http://webperf.org/a2/v31/2002-02-11-v29/
http://webperf.org/a2/v31/2002-02-12-v31/
the page is similiar to the 'NEWS-STORY-NORMAL' column in the old one..

check out the response time in the graphs.. can v1.3 get a 1-1.5 second response time as CPU increases like that ?? doubt it
3. mtmalloc
we found that using mtmalloc with apache 2.0 gave us a performance increase of 30% (yes 30%) by preloading the library

4. v31 has got a different pool allocater, which reduces the mutex contention considerably.

nice to see someone is referenceing my benchmarks ;-)

BTW .. solaris 8/8 cpu/GCC v2.95

while your surfing webperf.org.. why not download the agent and run it for a while?

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[ink]

Go get the source yourself, cuddle up to a posix threading book and pull out a 100% correct threading library. (Like the FreeBSD one.)

When did FreeBSD get 100% compliance?

http://www.idiom.com/~bko/bsd/freebsd-threads.txt

In addition, ngpth has been accepted by Linus and they are very close to 100% compliant as well as providing for M:N mapping to scale on multiple processors, and to give programmers choice of kernel or userland threads with standard calls. BSD is great and all, but you guys do way too much chest-pounding.