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

w00t!

[Pr0n K1ng]

I am the best! Get it in ya!

OSS has lost the battle for timothy's anus

[Anonymous Coward]

See topic.

And...?

[GigsVT]

So it's even more efficient at reading a file off a disk and shooting it out on port 80?
Really, aren't we to the point where the only thing we can get is more bloated and less efficient? Is there ever a point when software is "finished", in the open source world? Have we fallen victim to constant tinkering just because we can?

Re:And...?

[pepitoman]

Apache will be finished when it serves coffe off port 80

Re:And...?

[SweetAndSourJesus]

I think the Apache team carefully considers the efficiency of their software. I would hardly call it bloated code.

The way Apache is designed makes bloat optional. Sure, you can load it up with dozens of libraries, but you don't have to. Apache 2.0 can be made quite lean.

I tinker, therefore I am.

Re:And...?

[strags]

Err.... Read the article?

Wouldn't you agree that it's a good thing to improve Apache's portability?

There's also a lot more to a web server than just serving files straight off the hard drive.

Re:And...?

[MonMotha]

Two Words: Dynamic Content

While the server may be about as efficeient as you can get at serving up static pages, the web today revolves around serving up dynamic content. If the server can serve up PHP or Perl pages faster, more power to it.

--MonMotha

Re:And...?

[Wyrds]

http://rfc.net/rfc2324.html

Apache 2.0 is supposed to be multiprotocol, no?

Re:And...?

[Anonymous Coward]

lots of people are going to smack you down on this one for sure, just thought I'd add my 2bits

Apache modules in 1.3 are broken. This is a known issue. Module handling has been muchly improved in Apache 2, as well as vastly improved threading. Not too useful if you only run a small site, but you definatly care when you're getting slashdotted.

Urk.

Re:And...?

[TeknoHog]

Apache is doing a thing or two besides just calling "Passenger index.html, please contact gate 80". There are other, faster httpds around that focus on this simple task, for example Boa. (the joke works much better in Finnish)

Re:And...?

[TurboRoot]

Defiently. Sharing threads allows you to also share resources.. like.. database connections
cached content.. etc all in memory.

Things like this is why servers like aolserver and basically any J2EE(especially Resin) server stomps Apache in the ground as far as dynamic pages are concerned.

Re:And...?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think implimenting threads on Apache is hardly a tweak. If you feel nothing else needs to be done then stick with 1.3 but adding light wieght threads to the apache platform and where it applies is not tinkering and calling fork can be considered bloat. I do not want to sacrifice stability and efficiency either but there is always 1.3. for that.

Re:And...?

[johnnyb]

Apache has scalability problems. The APR will allow you to tune Apache to be most scalable for your platform. For Windows, it's threads only. For Linux, it will probably be the thread/process combo. This is a good thing. Apache REALLY needs this to move to the next level.

Re:And...?

[joedames]

I love the screenshot for boa.

Re:And...?

[smittyoneeach]

Had I mod points, I'd bump you up based on the .sig alone. <><
-1 Off Topic

Covalent

[reaper20]

Isn't Covalent selling an 'Apache 2.0' product? Does anyone have any experience with it?

I'd like to know the changes between their version and the 'official' version. It'd be interesting to note which features/bugfixes the Apache Foundation felt was worth waiting for.

Re:Covalent

[Moridineas]

Haha, not only did you not bothering reading the article (links), but you didn't even finish reading the post!!

"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." -krow

well done :)

Re:Covalent

[reaper20]

Typical slashbot, busy opening my cakehole without bothering to think. Heh.

PWP!

[Klerck]

.I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .enough .charaters .per .line .that .really .sucks .when .that .happens .and .you .have .to .put .some .lame .lameness .filter .defeater .text .in .there .i .wonder .how .many .people .will .read .this .whole .comment .I .certainly .hope .it .doesnt .annoy .too .many .people .This .is .just .the .beginning .because .PAGE .WIDENING .IS .BACK .I .like .wide .pages .I .wish .all .pages .could .be .as .wide .as .this .dont .you .wide .pages .are .much .cooler .than .those .narrow .pages .you .are .used .to .reading .because .you .dont .have .to .worry .about .the .lameness .filter .telling .you .that .you .don't .have .e

Re:PWP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Klerck, You know that doesn't work, right? At least not in Opera or Mozilla or Netscape.

Re:PWP!

[Klerck]

Indeed I realize that! It only works in IE for Windows from what I understand.

Re:PWP!

[SweetAndSourJesus]

excellent.

Re:PWP!

[The BOFH Troll]

I am amazed you haven't tried anything with non-breaking spaces yet.

Dirty Linux Hippies are Dying

[RoboTroll]

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Dirty GNU Hippie community when last month IDC confirmed that Rancid Smelling GNU Hippies account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all humans. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Natty haired greasy GNU Hippie have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Reeking Linux Hippies are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [sysadminmag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive /usr/bin/sh test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict the future of the Stinking sweaty Linux hippie. The hand writing is on the wall: Foul-stenched GNU hippies with swampy armpits face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for them because they are dying. Things are looking very bad for Hairy-backed GNU hippie. As many of us are already aware, they continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Troll leader Anonymouse Coward states that there are 7000 goatse.cx trolls. How many ascii art trolls are there? Let's see. The number of goatse.cx versus ascii art posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 ascii art trolls. Pimply-faced GNU hippies posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of ascii art posts. Therefore there are about 700 Dirty GNU Hippies. A recent article put "first post" at about 80 percent of the troll market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 "first post" trolls. This is consistent with the number of first posts.

All major surveys show that Putrid smelling greasy GNU hippies have steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Grubby Smelly Linux Hippies are to survive at all it will be among troll hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Dirty GNU Hippies are dead.

Re:Dirty Linux Hippies are Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree. "Putrid smelling, greasy,grubby, dirty, pimple faced" fill in the blank is a hard sell. I am not sure where you could put "super model" in all that and make me want to go out with her. I hope they are in decline brother. AMEN

Apache 2.0 Threads

[TurboRoot]

The main benefit of Apache in the first place is the stability benefited from the fork() nature of it.

Apache 2.0 brings some nice and intresting new features that only a multithreaded server can bring, but these are all features already available in tons of other web servers..

Unfortuantly, the programmers working on Apache 2.0 don't know how to write thread safe code. Don't believe me? Go get the source yourself, cuddle up to a posix threading book and pull out a 100% correct threading library. (Like the FreeBSD one.) :)

Example... DONT USE SLEEP(3) in a multithreaded application!.. but whatever :)

What I am basically saying is.. I would't get apache 2.0 for production _yet_. Someday Apache 2.0 will be the model for how a stable multithreaded multi-protocol server can be written.

By the way, I normally don't take time out to actually post. But since my moderation and meta moderation privs were removed since i moderated a post I found intresting.. to be intresting. (The great slashdot troll investigation). About 500 people lost their moderation ability at that time. What a nice brave new world.

The advance is. I can now say what I truely feel and not care about karma.. because this place is a joke. :)

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[nathanh]

But since my moderation and meta moderation privs were removed since i moderated a post I found intresting.. to be intresting. (The great slashdot troll investigation). About 500 people lost their moderation ability at that time. What a nice brave new world.

Boo fucking hoo.

The advance is. I can now say what I truely feel and not care about karma.. because this place is a joke. :)

You care enough to whinge about it.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[einer]

By the way, I normally don't take time out to actually post. But since my moderation and meta moderation privs were removed since i moderated a post I found intresting.. to be intresting. (The great slashdot troll investigation). About 500 people lost their moderation ability at that time. What a nice brave new world.

huh? link?

I must be living in a hole... Since when does moderating an unpopular post get your moderation rights/privs revoked? Which begs the question, is moderation a right or a privelage?

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the link.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

POSIX.1 specifies sleep(3) be both thread-safe and cancellation-safe.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

... oh, and say buh-bye to your karma. Tainted by association with the Post Of Doom :-)

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Xerithane]

As another person who lost mod privledges, it was just a massivly moderated by the editors thread. link already posted, but the loss of mod capability is in fact real.

I'll get modded down for this as well, just like you have. If you care about your karma don't respond.. it'll just go downhill.

Here is a link to the original post.
It had about 700 mods done to it I think, not sure of the exact number. It doesn't matter that I was blacklisted from moderating, because I wont anymore on slashdot even if I get it back or I'll abuse the system and mod trolls up. I tried to help out a discussion that I felt raised some very good and informative points, and it got me this. They can keep their moderation, and moderate everything themselves as far as I care.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

this place sure is a joke, i read the front page only and very rarely bother to read any posts anymore

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[augustz]

The link to the story of the post of doom (from one of the ACs posting) is http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/1/17/21155/1564 .

Reading this and the folks getting themselves into a lather reminds me of how long I've been around slashdot, I'm starting to feel old.

Someday someone is going to give a tour of the seven wonders of slashdot, and this 800+ moderation point comment will be on that tour. Wonder what the other six might be.

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.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

The very first "First Post".
The very first Goatsex link.
The "will you..." poll.
...

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is dying. That's because linux really sucks. It sucks so bad I want to puke all over cmdrTacos every time I hear someone talk about linus torvalds sweet gay anus. Linux gives opensource a bad name. Linux users give anal warts.

Also I should mention that slashdot is for sickos.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[sean23007]

What is it about a post like this (self pitying, resigned to being ignored) that forces people to mod it up? Is it a general agreement with his views, that this place is a joke? That can't be true (why are you all still here??). Is it the fact that you pity him for pitying himself? It seems to me that this guy is very pathetic, and points out the problems of the system at the same time as he takes advantage of its unique advantages (of course he takes these advantages for granted).

Perhaps it is because he fits in with the rest of you: he manages to spout mostly useless information about something he considers himself to be an expert, and surrounds his ideas in a thick wall of misspelled words and grammatical errors (yup, he must be a great coder, to be able to give such extensive criticisms of the experienced people at Apache!). Someone should perhaps tell him that an ellipsis has three periods, and a dictionary is just a few clicks away.

Perhaps he is against the system by default, and that's why he came here in the first place, but when it turned out that this place is just another system, he figured nothing good could come of it, and that power is being abused to suppress his (obviously flawless) ideas.

But the most likely situation, and I have noticed this in many other discussions, is that the statements "I don't care about karma," or "Everyone will mod me down for this" automatically guarantee that the comment will be rated at least a 4. What if it actually deserves to be modded down?

What if he just took a one time opportunity to vent his bitterness at the system that is holding him down? Must we all hear him? Mod me down if you will, but I will not be ignored.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Elias Ross]

What do you mean about sleep(3) not being thread-safe? I'd like to see more explaination about how you see Apache's code as not thread-safe. You are likely talking out of your arse, and you don't deserve to get moderated to '5'.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[ink]

Amen to that!

I'm sick of the "I know this is gonna get me modded down buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut" posts that go on and on about the oppressive regime of Slashdot, and then the insipid moderators mod the lame post up to prove that they really do care, and that they really do have open minds (when nothing further from the truth could be said). Like a bunch of sheep being led by wordsmiths, these lie-ridden posts, like the super-parent to this one, become +5 Insightful to appease some twisted sense of guilt and/or ignorance.

I have to ask all the moderators of the super-parent: Do you know jack-shit about what was said in the post? Did you do any research at all about the topic? No, you don't and no, you didn't; so I must ask: Why did you mod the post up?

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[TurboRoot]

Simple, a lot of platforms use lightweight userland threads that all reside within one process. When you sleep the process, all the threads will sleep.

Now, those thread libraries are suppost to relink the sleep calls to a thread safe way to accomplish the same thing.. but not all of them do.

Linux never had this problem, because of the _clone system call, which makes threads to be seperate processes that share memory. That isn't necessary a bad thing, but it makes developing threaded applications on Linux a bad idea because non thread safe code will work better on linux than other places.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, generally, when I see something like sleep(3), it means that a thread is waiting for an event to finish. It's polling in a loop by sleeping for 3 milliseconds, testing the status of the event it's waiting to finish, then sleep for another 3 milliseconds etc...

now the obvious problem with this is, well, you've just thrown away 3 milliseconds for that thread. This is horrible, especially since all threading systems have a wait/notify mechanism that provides the same functionality except that the thread will leave the loop as soon as the event is finished, instead of wasting an average of 1.5 milliseconds.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Juergen Kreileder]

Well, generally, when I see something like sleep(3), it means that a thread is waiting for an event to finish. It's polling in a loop by sleeping for 3 milliseconds...

3 seconds not 3 milliseconds! (see sleep in SUSv3/1003.1-2001)

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Electrum]

Well, generally, when I see something like sleep(3), it means that a thread is waiting for an event to finish.

That notation tells which manual section the name is in, not what parameters if any the function may be called with (many times the name is not a function). In this case, the "sleep" function is in manual section 3. i.e. you run "man 3 sleep".

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when somebody snuck some javascript into his homepage field, that would redirect to goatse.cx on a mouseover. That was pretty fucking cool.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Fweeky]

> a 100% correct threading library. (Like the FreeBSD one.)

FreeBSD's threading it actually supposed to be rather smelly - just ask on freebsd-hackers or so.

This is why Apache 2 on FreeBSD is best off sticking with the prefork MPM. The introduction of KSE's in -current will alleviate this, but that's still heavily in development.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Fweeky]

Should probably have included a link to http://people.freebsd.org/~jasone/kse/ for those who cba Googling; there is some good stuff about the current threading implimentations there too.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[BusterB]

> POSIX.1 specifies sleep(3) be both thread-safe and cancellation-safe.

I don't think he's talking about sleep being thread-safe. I think he's talking about using sleep rather than a condition variable and a while loop to wait for access to a shared resource. The problem with using sleep is that it's entirely dependent on system load/ speed/ alignment of the moon. Code like that assumes that if it waits a certain amount of time, the resource will be free.

Imagine checking to see if a pool is dry, noticing that it is, coming back later and jumping in without looking. It might be full later, but it's much better to keep looking and not jump until the pool actually has water.

This type of thing is especially hard to debug when you upgrade your hardware and your software mysteriously fails. Suddenly, you're not sleeping long enough to get an exclusive lock on a shared resource.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do you know jack-shit about what was said in the post? Did you do any research at all about the topic? No, you don't and no, you didn't; so I must ask: Why did you mod the post up?"

Somewhere around there's an Quit Slashdot page which makes the very valid argument that technical debates shouldn't be referreed by popular vote. Anyway, if you've read trolls by Bob Abooey or Steve Woston, you can see how easy confident-sounding, politically correct technobabble is a sure score 5 around here. Just make sure you are on the right side of the argument (BSD, Mozilla or Opera, Anti-Java).

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

fix: sleep() longer! (Zzzzzz...)

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a very edumakated man sir I must say i really don't understand what this hockey fool was impling like wow sleep is thread safe so we don't need MUTEX LOCKING we can just say "You get the resource for the next 30 seconds then one guy stands there with his stopwatch and waits 30 seconds and if the other guy isn't done we'll just beat him over the head with a hockey stick and steal his resources!"

This is the great big poopie problem with shared memory spaces is that people don't use mutex locking and semaphores properly and instead depend on certain arbitrary operations being atomic when in reality they're about as atomic as cmdrtaco eating a bag of poopie poop watch the poopie poop drool down his face.

What the world needs is for every OS to implement POSIX semaphores in the kernel and in the libc so that people can use them then we must educate people doing bad threaded programming because they think threads are a cool toy to play with but don't use them seriously and take long breaks where they go eat poopie poop for long periods of time.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[damiam]

Read this.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[ahde]

Of course, the only times threading is going to benefit you in Apache's model in on Windows (where processes are so damn heavy) or large SMP systems with heavy loads.

The real improvements are things like the cool forwarding that allows you to build simple modules that say -- parse an XML with embedded PHP and pass it off to SSI and then XSLT it.

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Wiener]

parse an XML with embedded PHP and pass it off to SSI and then XSLT it.

BINGO!

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the link that exploited the loophole in setting slashdot options - clicking on it in a post set goatse.cx to be in your slashboxes, and presented loads of cluebies with a gaping asshole on their slashdot front page. Magnificent... my all time favourite, in fact.

congrats

[Anonymous Coward]

I am inspired by your FP dedication.

BTW what kind of pr0n do you enjoy the most? I'm into straight one-on-one stuff mysef (I've given it up, but I used to dig it :) ).

Jason

Re:congrats

[Pr0n K1ng]

I much enjoy lesbian pr0n. Suze.net has a really nice lesbian sushi eating set.

Re:congrats

[Roto-Rooter Man]

Speaking of lesbians, Rosie O'Donnell is now officially out of the closet. Wow, what a shock.

Excellent Work - Worth the wait

[Dysan2k]

Personally, I don't mind waiting on the Apache project to take their time and do it right. I believe 2.0 isn't bloatware, but a far more modular and extensible version of the worlds fav. web server. Personally I've been waiting for a WHILE to start using it. I'm not sure if PHP4 will compile against it yet. Maybe out of CVS it will.

With the new threading, it should manage to push out pages a lot faster under load, and make better use of the processors. Might have to go download today. Here's a project for those of you bleeding edgers out there. I've yet to manage this one myself:

Apache 2.0 + mod_perl + php4 (with support for MySQL 4.x) + mod_ssl.

I don't think non-CVS PHP4 will handle MySQL 4.x, but perhaps there are others that know how.

Back to topic, way to go guys!!

Re:Excellent Work - Worth the wait

[consumer]

You can't do that yet. Both mod_perl and mod_php have to be ported to the new Apache 2 API first.

Re:Excellent Work - Worth the wait

[gid]

Well I just got cvs php4.2.0-dev to compile against apache2, with some tweaking of the php4/configure file that buildconf generates, so the support is there. I tried using php 4.1.1 but it was having nothing of the sorts, I modified the configure file the same way, but make gave me some error from outerspace halfway through the compile, which unforunately is long gone off my rxvt buffer. :/

Apache2 with php4 was up and running for a little bit, I hit one php page, it worked fine, and I think apache2 segfaulted sometime after that, I might have hit the status page first. Now apache2 won't even start with php4 enabled, no error messages, no nothing, not even turning on debug in the error_log, still no messages. It simply doesn't start. If I disable the php module it starts fine. Oh well, guess I'll stick to apache 1.3.23 for the time being.

Here's a piece of the error_log for anyone intersted:
[Wed Feb 20 13:06:22 2002] [notice] Apache/2.0.32 (Unix) PHP/4.2.0-dev configured -- resuming normal operations
[Wed Feb 20 13:06:45 2002] [error] [client 216.4.165.11] Invalid method in request ***binary junk here /. hates, this message 4 times, around 4 seconds apart***
[Wed Feb 20 13:10:59 2002] [notice] Graceful restart requested, doing restart
[Wed Feb 20 13:11:08 2002] [notice] seg fault or similar nasty error detected in the parent process
[Wed Feb 20 13:27:52 2002] [notice] Apache/2.0.32 (Unix) configured -- resuming normal operations

It's not just for break^H^H^H, er, files anymore

[Eryq]

Many sites use Apache as an application server or to serve dynamic-content; e.g., by using mod_perl (to deliver blazingly-fast dynamic content generated by Perl scripts), or as a flexible and solid front-end to Java servlet engines like JServ and Tomcat.

And far from being bloatware, Apache has (at least during 1.*) gotten more modularized over time, making it easier to fine-tune logging, access control, URL rewriting, etc, etc. I don't know squat about 2.x, but I expect good things.

Just the $0.02 of a Perl/Java hacker who uses it extensively...

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!

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

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[pangloss]

what exactly was wrong with APACI? i haven't been following apache2 so this is the first mention i've heard of it. the docs just say now apache2 looks more like other open source projects in the install process. is that the sole benefit?

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[Electrum]

I've been using Apache 2 on Linux and FreeBSD for about 2 months now (...), and IMHO it is really going to rock the server world.

This isn't meant to be a flame, but a genuine complaint of the Apache web server that I haven't seen adequately addressed anywhere. How can Apache claim to be a modern web server if it continues to use an outdated request model? Having a separate process or thread for each request is completely unnecessary. Even for a site with dynamic content, the majority of the requests will be for static content (images). So why use up system resources when not necessary?

A request for static content is essentially just moving data from one file descriptor to a socket, something that sendfile(2) can be used for on operating systems that implement it. If a single system call combined with a select(2) loop can handle the majority of the requests, then why is each request tying up a process or a thread? When reading the Apache mailing lists, you get answers such as "it's too difficult for other programmers to extend the server", "processes or threads don't have to be expensive depending on how the operating system implements them", "everyone is happy with how it works now", and "Apache is meant to be correct first and fast second". None of these address the issue that Apache's request model is flawed, and it will never be high performance until it is corrected.

Additionally, the Zeus Web Server is well implemented and doesn't suffer from any of the problems that seem to keep Apache from being implemented correctly. It's also better than Apache in every way, ranging from performance to configuration (with the exception of not being open source). Zeus did everything right and built a great web server. Years later, Apache is just now getting their next version into beta, and it seems to be just as fundamentally flawed as the first version. If there is ever an open source web server as high quality as Zeus, then it more than likely won't be Apache.

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[/ASCII]

If serving huge amounts (>1 GB/hour)of static content from a single-CPU computer is what your server does, Apache is not for you. The Apache model will never do that as fast as Tux, Zeus or Boa.

But if you would stop to think for a while, you would see that no one does that. Nowdays, it's all about dynamic content. And in that case the overhead of using multiple threads is tiny compared to the added benefits of scalability and stability.

It is actually possible to use a kernel-based server like Tux for static content and let Apache take care of the dynamic bits.

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[Electrum]

If serving huge amounts (>1 GB/hour)of static content from a single-CPU computer is what your server does, Apache is not for you.

A well designed non blocking server can run in multiple processes, to take advantage of multiple CPU's. Zeus does this.

But if you would stop to think for a while, you would see that no one does that. Nowdays, it's all about dynamic content. And in that case the overhead of using multiple threads is tiny compared to the added benefits of scalability and stability.

That's wrong. As I said, most of your requests will be static content. Take Slashdot, for example. This comment posting page is one perl page, and six images. Do you really need six extra processes for those images? Especially large Apache processes that have mod_perl and who knows what else compiled into them. Sure, the code pages should be shared, but it's still poor design.

It is actually possible to use a kernel-based server like Tux for static content and let Apache take care of the dynamic bits.

Sure you can do that, but wouldn't it be better to use a well designed server in first place, and not have to kludge around design flaws in the web server? Your web server should not be your application server. Your web server should be serving web pages. Your application server should be running applications. The Apache model of "build everything conceivable into the web server process" is a bad idea, and is not consistent with the unix philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well.

Everyone knows CGI's are bad for performance because it causes forking a separate CGI process for each request. Turning the CGI's into Apache modules solves this problem, but not in an optimal way. Applications do not belong in the web server. A model such as FastCGI is a much better approach. It is similar to CGI, especially in the sense that it is easy to program for. But instead of running the process and using stdin/stdout as with a CGI, it connects to the FastCGI via a socket. Thus the application stays running, and there is no process creation overhead. It keeps any necessary load balancing on the application end where it belongs, and out of the web server.

Additionally, the application doesn't even need to be on the same box. You can have one or several application servers, and a single web server. A web server only needs to handle data. A single box should be able to fill your outbound pipe, or at least around 100mbits of it. If an application is slowing it down, then you need another application server, not another web server. It is unfortunate that the two are not seen as the separate entities that they should be.

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[jslag]

Take Slashdot, for example. This comment posting page is one perl page, and six images. Do you really need six extra processes for those images? Especially large Apache processes that have mod_perl and who knows what else compiled into them.

I doubt that any mod_perl based site is set up in such a way. At a bare miniumum, mod_perl sites have two apache binaries serving pages: one for the static pages, one for the dynamic pages. The static binary is obviously as lightweight as possible. If you're really interested in mod_perl tuning check out the mod_perl guide at perl.apache.org.

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[Electrum]

I doubt that any mod_perl based site is set up in such a way. At a bare miniumum, mod_perl sites have two apache binaries serving pages: one for the static pages, one for the dynamic pages. The static binary is obviously as lightweight as possible. If you're really interested in mod_perl tuning check out the mod_perl guide at perl.apache.org.

Why should you go through all that extra hassle to make up for a design flaw in the web server? Wouldn't it make more sense to use a non blocking web server with a single process per CPU, and have the Perl FastCGI handling the Perl code?

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[jslag]

Why should you go through all that extra hassle to make up for a design flaw in the web server?

What extra hassle? It took me 15 minutes.

As to the why, that's easy: so I can use Mason, which is IMHO the greatest web development tool since sliced bread.

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Threads are not processes!!!!! Or.. at least they shouldn't be. Yet another way that Linux blows nads compared to a real operating system. Threading is still a badly tacked on afterthought in Linux. Maybe in another decade or two...

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Then use zeus for static pages, and Apache (an APPLICATION SERVER which happens to talk HTTP and feed static content, conveniently) for dynamic content. Zeus doesn't DO dynamic stuff...

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[ahde]

Sliced bread is cool for creating web-content, but for really cool websites, you should really try torillas!

Re:Apache 2 is going to kick ass

[Electrum]

Then use zeus for static pages, and Apache (an APPLICATION SERVER which happens to talk HTTP and feed static content, conveniently) for dynamic content. Zeus doesn't DO dynamic stuff...

Zeus most certainly does handle dynamic content, and it handles it very well. Zeus supports CGI, FastCGI, NSAPI and ISAPI (basically everything that's not proprietary, like Apache).

Yet another "nearly" out

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... we all wanted to know that Apache is *NEARLY* ready for 2.0! I'm sure that the people who care wouldn't be reading the latest apache releases on /.

For fucks sake the news gets more pathetic on this site every day!

There is more to that

[artur]

This is usually the case when you are serving static pages for a page that is viewed one time a day.

However, it gets complicated when you serve pages that are dynamically generated for various users. You want to be able to pass content of a file through various modules. You can tell that you want the page to go through mod_perl and then through SSL modules. You can also stack any modules in between.
The new version makes it easy.

Of course there is a lot of other things besides the "reading and shooting" files (IPv6, web caching, etc).

IIS is still the way to go

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, But I will be sticking with IIS for serving web pages. I mean if not for recovering from crashes and constantly applying patches what work would I have. People might think my job is redundant. ;-)

(drumroll)...the changelog

[Chinese Karma Whore]

(session of passionate karma whoring commences)

Changes with Apache 2.0.32

*) mod_negotiation: ForceLanguagePriority now uses 'Prefer' as the
default if the directive is not specified. This mirrors older
behavior without changes to the httpd.conf. [William Rowe]

*) Win32: solve the win32 service problems in 2.0.31-alpha, by fixing
the service, mpm and logging code, and bugs in apr_file_open_stderr
and apr_file_dup2 functions. Win2K/XP services have no handles
associated for stdin/out/err, which caused unpredictable behavior
in the prior release. [William Rowe, Bill Stoddard]

*) Win32: simplify the Application Event Log messages, since there isn't
likely to be 'more information in the error log' before an error log
has been opened. [William Rowe]

*) Win32: substantial cleanup to the mpm_winnt code for legibility and
to follow the program flow of other MPMs. [Ryan Bloom, William Rowe]

*) Win32: apache -k shutdown now behaves like apache -k stop.
[Bill Stoddard]

*) Fix prefork to not kill the parent if a child hits a resource shortage
on accept(). [Greg Ames]

*) Fix seg faults that occur when what should be the httpd request line
starts with \r\n followed by garbage. [Greg Ames]

*) Allow statically linked support binaries with the new
--enable-static-support flag, and enable this behavior in
the binbuild script. Also add a new --enable-static-htdbm
flag. [Aaron Bannert]

*) Allow mod_autoindex to serve symlinks if permitted and attempt to
do only one stat() call when generating the directory listings.
[Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Fix resolve_symlink to save the original symlink name if known.
[Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Be a bit more sane with regard to CanonicalNames. If the user has
specified they want to use the CanonicalName, but they have not
configured a port with the ServerName, then use the same port that
the original request used. [Ryan Bloom and Ken Coar]

*) In core_input_filter, check for an empty brigade after
APR_BRIGADE_NORMALIZE(). Otherwise, we can get segfaults if a
client says it will post some data but we get FIN before any
data arrives. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Not being able to bind to the socket is a fatal error. We should
print an error to the console, and return a non-zero status code.
With these changes, all of the Unix MPMs do that correctly.
[Ryan Bloom]

*) suexec: Allow HTTPS and SSL_* environment variables to be passed
through to CGI scripts. PR 9163
[Brian Reid ,
Zvi Har'El ]

*) binbuild.sh: Make sure that we use the expat from our source
tree so that there aren't any surprises on the target machine.
[Jeff Trawick]

*) mod_cgid: Add retry logic for when the daemon can't fork fast
enough to keep up with new requests. Start using
HTTP_SERVER_UNAVAILABLE instead of HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR
when we can't talk to the daemon. [Jeff Trawick]

*) apxs: LTFLAGS envvar can override default libtool options. Try
"LTFLAGS=' ' apxs -c mod_foo.c" to see what libtool does under
the covers. [Jeff Trawick]

*) The Location: response header field, used for external
redirect, *must* be an absoluteURI. The Redirect directive
tested for that, but RedirectMatch didn't -- it would allow
almost anything through. Now it will try to turn an abs_path
into an absoluteURI, but it will correctly varf like Redirect
if the final redirection target isn't an absoluteURI. [Ken Coar]

Changes with Apache 2.0.31

*) Create the scoreboard (in the parent) in a global pool context,
so it survives graceful restarts. This fixes a SEGV during
graceful restarts. [Aaron Bannert]

*) Add a timeout option to the proxy code 'ProxyTimeout'
[Ian Holsman]

*) FTP directory listings are now always retrieved in ASCII mode.
The FTP proxy properly escapes URI's and HTML in the generated
listing, and escapes the path components when talking to the FTP
server. It is now possible to browse the root directory by using
a url like: ftp://user@host/%2f/ (ported from apache_1.3.24)
Also, the last path component may contain wildcard characters
'*' and '?', and if they do, a directory listing is created instead
of a file retrieval. Example: ftp://user@host/httpd/server/*.c
[Martin Kraemer]

*) Added single-listener unserialized accept support to the
worker MPM [Brian Pane]

*) New Directive for mod_proxy: 'ProxyPreserveHost'. This passes
the incoming host header through to the proxied server
[Geoff ]

*) New Directive Option for ProxyPass. It now can block a location
from being proxied [Jukka Pihl ]

*) Don't let the default handler try to serve a raw directory. At
best you get gibberish. Much worse things can happen depending
on the OS. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Change the pre_config hook to return a value. Modules can now emit
an error message and then cause the server to quit gracefully during
startup. This required a bump to the MMN. [Aaron Bannert]

*) Fix some unix socket descriptor leaks in the handler side of
mod_cgid (the part that runs in the server process). Whack a
silly "close(-1)" in the handler too. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Change the pre_mpm hook to return a value, so that scoreboard
init errors percolate up to code that knows how to exit
cleanly. This required a bump to the MMN. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Add the socket back to the conn_rec and remove the create_connection
hook. The create_connection hook had a design flaw that did not
allow creating connections based on vhost info. [Bill Stoddard]

*) Fixed PATH_INFO and QUERY_STRING from mod_negotiation results.
Resolves the common case of using negotation to resolve the request
/script/foo for /script.cgi/foo. [William Rowe]

*) Added new functions ap_add_(input|output)_filter_handle to
allow modules to bypass the usual filter name lookup when
adding hard-coded filters to a request [Brian Pane]

*) caching should now work on subrequests (still very experimental)
[Ian Holsman]

*) The Win32 mpm_winnt now has a shared scoreboard. [William Rowe]

*) Change ap_get_brigade prototype to use apr_off_t instead of apr_off_t*.
[Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Refactor ap_rgetline so that it does not use an internal brigade.
Change ap_rgetline's prototype to return errors. [Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Remove mod_auth_db. [Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Do not install unnecessary pcre headers like config.h and internal.h.
[Joe Orton ]

*) Change in quick_hanlder behavior for subrequests. it now passes DONE
(as it does for a normal request). quick_handled sub-requests now work
in mod-include [Ian Holsman]

*) Change SUBREQ_CORE so that it is a 'HTTP_HEADER' filter instead of
'CONTENT' one, as it needs to run AFTER all content headers

*) Rename BeOS MPM directive RequestsPerThread to MaxRequestsPerThread.
[Lars Eilebrecht]

*) Split out blocking from the mode in the input filters.
[Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Fix a segfault in mod_include. [Justin Erenkrantz, Jeff Trawick]

*) Cause Win32 to capture all child-worker process errors in
Apache to the main server error log, until the child can
open its own error logs. [William Rowe]

*) HPUX 11.*: Do not kill the child process when accept()
returns ENOBUFS on HPUX 11.*. (ported from a 1.3 patch
by [madhusudan_mathihalli@hp.com])
[Bill Stoddard]

*) Fix a problem in the parsing of the directive.
[Jeff Trawick]

*) rewrite of mod_ssl input filter for better performance and less
memory usage [Doug MacEachern]

*) allow quick_handler to be run on subrequests. [Ian Holsman]

*) mod_dav now asks its provider to place content directly into the
filter stack when handling a GET request. The mod_dav/provider
API has changed, so providers need to be updated. [Greg Stein]

*) Clear the output socket descriptor in unixd_accept() to make sure
we don't supply a bogus socket to the caller if the accept fails.
This caused problems with the worker MPM, which tried to process
the returned socket if it was non-NULL. [Brian Pane]

*) Move a check for an empty brigade to the start of core input filter
to avoid segfaults. [Justin Erenkrantz, Jeff Trawick]

*) Add FileETag directive to allow configurable control of what
data are used to form ETag values for file-based URIs. MMN
bumped to 20020111 because of fields added to the end of
the core_dir_config structure. [Ken Coar]

*) Fix a segfault in mod_rewrite's logging code caused by passing the
wrong config to ap_get_remote_host(). [Jeff Trawick]

*) Allow mod_cgid to work from a binary distribution install by
using 755 for the permissions on the log directory instead of
750. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Fixed a segfault that happened during graceful shutdown (or when
the httpd ran out of file descriptors) with the worker MPM [Brian Pane]

*) Split all Win32 modules [excluding the core components mod_core,
mod_so, mod_win32 and the winnt mpm] into individual loadable
modules, so the administrator may individually disable the former
compiled-in modules by simply commenting out their LoadModule
directives. [William Rowe]

*) Saved Win32 module authors and porters many future headaches, by
duplicating the appropriate .h files such as os.h into the include
directory, including in the build tree. [William Rowe]

*) mod_ssl adjustments to help with using toolkits other than OpenSSL:
Use SSL functions/macros instead of directly dereferencing SSL
structures wherever possible.
Add type-casts for the cases where functions return a generic pointer.
Add $SSL/include to configure search path.
[Madhusudan Mathihalli ]

*) Moved several pointers out of the shared Scoreboard so it is
more portable, and will present the vhost name across server
generation restarts. [William Rowe]

*) Fix SSLPassPhraseDialog exec: and SSLRandomSeed exec:
[Doug MacEachern]

Changes with Apache 2.0.30

*) Fix the main bug for FreeBSD and threaded MPM's. There are
still issues (see STATUS) but at least the server will now
run without crashing the machine.
[David Reid, Aaron Bannert, Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Fix a typo in mod_deflate's m4 config section.
[albert chin (china@thewrittenword.com)]

*) Fix a couple of mod_proxy problems forwarding HTTP connections
and handling CONNECT:
(1) PR #9190 Proxy failed to connect to IPv6 hosts.
(2) Proxy failed to connect when the first IP address returned by
the resolver was unreachable but a secondary IP address was.
[Jeff Trawick]

*) Fix the module identifer as shown in the docs for various core
modules (e.g., the identifer for mod_log_config was previously
listed as config_log_module). PR #9338
[James Watson ]

*) Fix LimitRequestBody directive by placing it in the HTTP
filter. [Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Fix mod_proxy seg fault when the proxied server returns
an HTTP/0.9 response or a bogus status line.
[Adam Sussman]

*) Prevent mod_proxy from truncating one character off the
end of the status line returned from the proxied server.
[Adam Sussman, Bill Stoddard]

*) Eliminate loop in ap_proxy_string_read().
[Adam Sussman, Bill Stoddard]

*) Provide $0..$9 results from mod_include regex parsing.
[William Rowe]

*) Allow mod-include to look for alternate start & end tags [Ian Holsman]

*) Introduced the ForceLanguagePriority directive, to prevent
returning MULTIPLE_CHOICES or NONE_ACCEPTABLE in some cases,
when using Multiviews. [William Rowe]

*) Fix a problem which prevented mod_cgid and suexec from working
together reliably [Greg Ames]

*) Remove the call to exit() from within mod_auth_digest's post_config
phase. [Aaron Bannert]

*) Fix a problem in mod_auth_digest that could potentially cause
problems with initialized static data on a system that uses DSOs.
[Aaron Bannert]

*) Fix a segfault in the worker MPM that could happen during
child process exits. [Brian Pane, Aaron Bannert]

*) Allow mod_auth_dbm to handle multiple DBM types [Ian Holsman]

*) Fix matching of vhosts by ip address so we find IPv4
vhost address when target address is v4-mapped form of
that address. [Jeff Trawick]

*) More performance tweaks to the BNDM string-search algorithm
used to find ",
Gary Hook , Victor Orlikowski, Jeff Trawick]

*) Fix the handling of SSI directives in which the ">" of the
terminating "-->" is the last byte in a file [Brian Pane]

*) Add back in the "suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /path/to/suexec)"
message that we had back in apache-1.3 and still have scattered
throughout our docs. [Aaron Bannert]

*) Prevent the Win32 port from continuing after encountering an
error in the command line args to apache. [William Rowe]

*) On a error in the proxy, make it write a line to the error log
[Ian Holsman]

*) Various mod_ssl performance improvements [Doug MacEachern]

Changes with Apache 2.0.29

*) Add buffering in core_output_filter to ensure that long
lists of small buckets don't cause small packet writes.
[Brian Pane, Ryan Bloom]

*) Fix the installation target to make sure that the manual is
installed in the correct location.
[Yoshifumi Hiramatsu and
Gomez Henri ]

*) Fix the cmd command for mod_include. When we are processing
a cmd command, we do not want to use the r->filename to set
the command name. The command comes from the SSI tag. To do this,
I added a variable to the function that builds the command line
in mod_cgi. This allows the include_cmd function to specify
the command line itself. [Ryan Bloom]

*) Change open_logs hook to return a value, allowing you
to flag a error while opening logs
[Ian Holsman, Doug MacEachern]

*) Change post_config hook to return a value, allowing you
to flag a error post config
[Ian Holsman, Jeff Trawick]

*) Allow SUEXEC_BIN (the path to the suexec binary that is
hard-coded into the server) to be specified to the configure
script by the --with-suexec-bin parameter. [Aaron Bannert]

*) Fix segv in worker MPM following accept on pipe-of-death
[Brian Pane]

*) Add mod_deflate to experimental.
[Ian Holsman, Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Bail out at configure time if an invalid MPM was specified.
[jean-frederic clere ]

*) Prevent segv in ap_note_basic_auth_failure() when no AuthName is
configured [John Sterling ]

*) Fix apxs to use sbindir. [Henri Gomez ]

*) Fix a problem with IPv6 vhosts. PR #8118 [Jeff Trawick]

*) Optimization for the BNDM string-search function in
mod_include. [Brian Pane]

*) Fixed the behavior of the XBitHack directive.
[Taketo Kabe , Cliff Woolley] PR#8804

*) The threaded MPM for Unix has been removed. Use the worker
MPM instead. [various]

*) APR-ize the resolver logic in mod_unique_id. This fixes a bug
in logging the error from a failed DNS lookup. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Added the missing macros AP_INIT_TAKE13 and AP_INIT_TAKE123.
[Cliff Woolley]

*) Get mod_cgid killed when a MPM exits due to a fatal error.
[Jeff Trawick]

*) Fix a file descriptor leak in mod_include. When we include a
file, we use a sub-request, but we didn't destroy the sub-request
immediately, instead we waited until the original request was
done. This patch closes the sub-request as soon as the data is
done being generated. [Brian Pane ]

*) Allow modules that add sockets to the ap_listeners list to
define the function that should be used to accept on that
socket. Each MPM can define their own function to use for
the accept function with the MPM_ACCEPT_FUNC macro. This
also abstracts out all of the Unix accept error handling
logic, which has become out of synch across Unix MPMs.
[Ryan Bloom]

*) Fix a bug which would cause the response headers to be omitted
when sending a negotiated ErrorDocument because the required
filters were attached to the wrong request_rec.
[John Sterling ]

*) Remove commas from the end of the macros that define
directives that are used by MPMs. Prior to this patch,
you would use these macros without commas, which was unlike
the macros for any other directives. Now, the caller provides
the comma rather than the macro providing it. This makes
the macros look more like the rest of the directives.
[Ryan Bloom and Cliff Woolley]

*) Add 'redirect-carefully' environment option to disable sending
redirects under special circumstances. This is helpful for
Microsoft's WebFolders when accessing a directory resource via
DAV methods. [Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Begin to abstract out the underlying transport layer.
The first step is to remove the socket from the conn_rec,
the server now lives in a context that is passed to the
core's input and output filters. This forces us to be very
careful when adding calls that use the socket directly,
because the socket isn't available in most locations.
[Ryan Bloom]

*) Really reset the MaxClients value in worker and threaded
when the configured value is not a multiple of the number
of threads per child. We said we did previously but we
forgot to. [Jeff Trawick]

*) Add Debian layout. [Daniel Stone ]

*) If shared modules are requested and mod_so is not available,
produce a fatal config-time error. [Justin Erenkrantz]

*) Improve http2env's performance by cutting the work it has to
do. [Brian Pane ]

*) use new 'apr_hash_merge' function in mod_mime (performance fix)
[Brian Pane ]

Re:(drumroll)...the changelog

[Chinese Karma Whore]

screw you niggers.

Re:(drumroll)...the changelog

[Chinese Karma Whore]

fuck you, niggers!

slashdot readme

[Mode0x13]

Slashdot: Where Old News Stories go to Die

It's time for another five minutes' hate, slashdottoires! Only this time,

the target is yourself. In all my life I've never seen such a pathetic collection

of nerds and losers, gathered to blabber on aimlessly about politically biased,

technologically incorrect news stories. Slashdot is the public urinal of the internet:

nothing goes in or comes out but human waste, and the editors are always
looking over your
shoulder to monitor the "data stream."

ENJOY!!

d00d, change your sig!

[Pr0n K1ng]

The goat is back!

Re:d00d, change your sig!

[Roto-Rooter Man]

Done. Perhaps this piece of news is something that each individual should have to discover for him- or herself though, hmm?

In other news

[RMSIsAnIdiot]

The Microsoft Windows.NET Server project has released a new beta of their IIS 6.0 server. For those who have not been following Windows.NET Server development, this is the third beta that has been produced. With Covalent already selling a commercial version of Apache 2.0, hopefully we will see how open source is a sham, and yes, in a capitalist society, open source is really just a Communist's utopia. It's idiots like Miguel de Icaza who really twist the scenario --- Oh yeah, open source is you know, great and all, but I have to do other stuff and actually sell it so I can make a decent living.

It's people like RMS and ESR that make me wonder... people actually look up to these guys? Yeah, RMS knows Unix, and so do many others, but those many others don't resemble a homeless man in downtown Chicago eating out of a street trash can.

But yet, they fool the young of our society. Their "Linux" is somewhat akin to a drug dealer tempting a child with drugs... it gives them something exciting to play with, yet they are completely unaware of the downward spiral they are getting sucked into by the Open Source Advocates®. Fools like RMS preach their philosophy like a struggling black-on-white tied Mormon missionary ready to convert you, yet they get paid to speak. But the poor souls who are getting brainwashed by this blasphemy fail to realize that they will never get paid, instead working for free, and searching through apartment house dumpsters for some stale bread and an empty jar of Jif peanut butter, ready to scrape the insides for a savory morsel.

If you're reading this, don't fall into the trap, young man. There is help available. Remember that guidance counselor in high school that told you that you would never amount to anything. Well, keep doing what you're doing and she'll turn out to be right.

"Share, and share alike, everything is free (as in libre, not beer). But please send me some money (as in dinero, not beer) so I can feed my baby daughter."

-Random Open Source Developer

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

[BigBir3d]

Configurability is also very important. If 2.0 can be configured better than 1.x ever could, for me, than it will be faster, giving me more performance.

Re:Performance results

[augustz]

Couldn't agree more, stability and a low bug-count matter a lot for those with a bunch of servers to maintain and don't want to discount that.

But 1.3 seems to bear up great for me at least in those respects, and higher performance means fewer servers is always appealing.

Re:Performance results

[rchatterjee]

What compiler did they use for these results? I'm assuming GCC but would they have gotten better results using Intel's C++ compiler (or Sun's on a SPARC system)with the new Apache 2.0 code? I've heard you get much better SMP performence from Apache 2.0 using the compilers from the chip designers but i was wondering if anyone has tried this out and knows for sure.

Re:Performance results

[daemous]

Uh, those are old and there have been many improvements since then (mostly optimizing away mallocs). This report was used to press that issue and get everyone behind a faster httpd.

It is true it isn't a huge performance win, but it is better than 1.3.

Re:Performance results

[Anonymous Coward]

Apache is written in C, not C++.

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:Performance results

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel C++ compiler compiles C as well

Re:Performance results

[webperf]

one more point. these pages utilize mod-include VERY heavily. we found a EXPONENTIAL increase in speed in relation to decrease in the number of includes on the page.

apache rules!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not that much of a linux guy, but I love apache, it is the best server software ever (under linux, of course)!

The PLP/PWP Theme Song!

[Frank White]

PLEASE if anyone has the troll version of the Star Spangled Banner, post it!

The PLP/PWP Theme Song
(sung to the tune of "Three's Company")

Come and look at our trolls
Come and look at our trolls
Slashdot org is our host
Slashdot org is our host
And you'll see an annoying comment called
Page Lengthening Post!

When I'm reading this site
When I'm reading this site
This upsets me the most
This upsets me the most
Cuz it makes all the pages hard to read
Page Widening Post!

You'll raise your threshold to zero and email Taco real soon!

Now let's all raise a toast
Now let's all raise a toast
Page Lengthening Post!

Stephen King, author, dead at 54

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.

Re:Stephen King, author, dead at 54

[Original AIDS Monkey]

The real tragedy was that his corpse's mouth was found wrapped around Alan Thicke's decomposing cock.

Per-per-gripe whinging?

[malxau]

What's with all the griping about how bloated and bad apache is, then how great IIS is, and how a web server should just read and write?

Is this item being taken over by Microsoft?

Everyone, download it and try it for yourself. It's really cool.

Linux is #1 transmission mode for anal warts

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is dying. That's because linux really sucks. It sucks so bad I want to puke all over cmdrTacos every time I hear someone talk about linus torvalds sweet gay anus. Linux gives opensource a bad name. Linux users give anal warts.

Also I should mention that slashdot is for sickos.

Re:Linux is #1 transmission mode for anal warts

[Anonymous Coward]

test

Blacks: Clinton Greatest President Ever

[Original AIDS Monkey]

WASHINGTON - Abraham Lincoln has moved to the top of the list of greatest presidents in an ABC News poll for President's Day that saw George W. Bush ease ahead of Ronald Reagan in the overall survey and among Republicans.

Lincoln was chosen by 20 percent, while the current president and John F. Kennedy were essentially tied for second -- with Kennedy at 14 percent and Bush at 13 percent. Reagan, Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt were tied for third at 8 percent apiece.

In the same ABC poll a year ago, Reagan was at the top with 18 percent, Kennedy 16 percent and Lincoln 14 percent.

Kennedy and Lincoln were tied atop the list among Democrats this year, whereas Lincoln was the easy winner among independents, and Bush and Lincoln led among Republicans, with Reagan slightly behind them.

Lincoln was first among whites, but second among blacks, who overwhelmingly chose Clinton as the greatest president. One of Lincoln's best known achievements was freeing the slaves during the Civil War. Roosevelt was the leader among those 65 and older.

The poll was conducted Feb. 13-17 among a sample of 1,025 adults and had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Alan Thicke. DEAD.

[Alan_Thicke]

I just heard the sad news on CBC radio. Comedy actor/writer Alan Thicke was found dead in his home this morning. Even if you never liked his work, you can appreciate what he did for 80's television. Truly a Canadian icon.
He will be missed :(



Show me That Smile (The Growing Pains Theme Song):

Show me that smile again.
Ooh show me that smile.
Don't waste another minute on your crying.
We're nowhere near the end.
We're nowhere near.
The best is ready to begin.

As long as we got each other
We got the world
Sitting right in our hands.
Baby rain or shine;
All the time.
We got each other
Sharing the laughter and love.

The 7 Wonders of /.

[Vainglorious Coward]

I'd nominate the AC first post that got modded to +5 Funny and was on-topic.

Re:The 7 Wonders of /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice find. A miraculous confluence of events under any circumstances.

I tend to browse at 2+ comment threshold, but there is a ton of good stuff below that now that a lot of the outright annoying trolls are gone.

- August

Heh heh.

[Scoria]

Whenever there's a new Apache build (for Windows, too; this is uncharacteristic of Slashdot), it seems to deserve being posted on the front page.

Slashdot editors: I doubt you are in requirement of being reminded that infinitely more informative stories are forced to lurk in the dungeon known as "that subject's section." I (and probably a great number of Slashdot readers) would be greatly appreciative if you'd leave Apache propaganda (and other inane 'stories') in their respective areas and move those underrated gems to the front page. Thank you.

Re:Heh heh.

[Scoria]

Good job, moderator!

It was constructive criticism, not a troll. Down to 49 karma, I suppose.

COLOR SCHEME

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the color scheme change on some stories? Purple for Apache? Did /. always do that? Is there a way to disable it? What other stories have colors associated?

MSI Installer == Spiffy

[justin_w_hall]

First off, I have to rant about how much I love their precompiled MSI builds. Convincing my boss that installing a webserver to replace IIS would be easy was about 3 million times earlier with that... run it, click thru the wizard, once-over the config file and you're up. Now you, too, can escape the IIS headaches in less than five minutes!

With that said, has anyone tried the MSI for this latest beta? It didn't create the service for me automatically, and I wasn't sure if it was just my crackpipe or if it was an actual problem. Bug report's been filed already, just wanted to see if anyone else had any input...

Re:MSI Installer == Spiffy

[Anonymous Coward]

yup had that problem uninstalled it right after that as it is definately not stable enough for me if it can't even do such a simple thing correctly

Re:MSI Installer == Spiffy

[darkwhite]

Yeah, it's strange, because the previous beta does install the service. It's easy though, just run apache -i.

I've just switched to 2.0 a few days ago on win32... so far it's been about the same as 1.3 for me, the only thing I had a problem with is that it doesn't substitute paths for shebang lines in cgi-bin files, so I have to write out full paths (1.3 did). And the conf file from 1.3 doesn't exactly work right away with 2 (which would be nice), I had to tweak it. Otherwise it's great.

Re:MSI Installer == Spiffy

[loconet]

"Convincing my boss that installing a webserver to replace IIS would be easy was about 3 million times earlier with that"

I'm a CS student graduating soon, why is there such a hard time making bosses see the beauty and less hassle of these projects linux/apache/etc compare to the MSWin/IIS choice...I mean, who with the smallest notion on what is good would put up a fight to choose IIS over apache!? Will I have the same wonderful challange?

Re:MSI Installer == Spiffy

[justin_w_hall]

Well, it's especially hard because my company's a Microsoft Certified Partner. When I came on board we were relying on Microsoft products for everything, and I don't think anyone realized that there were a few better ways of doing stuff - proxy, for example, as Squid and IPFilter on a ghetto Pentium box smoked MS Proxy 2.0 (on a box twice as fast).

So I'm starting to get away with using Linux and *BSD for things that they're better for, and as a result I'm slowly chipping away at the MS-dominant infrastructure we have piece by piece. YMMV, but it seems that the 'notion on what is good' doesn't always click with management.

How much karma do you lose?

[archen]

Guess I'll see....

Much like Linux 1.0

[Sivar]

Apache 2.0 is quite a bit like Linux 1.0 and, to a lesser degree, Linux 2.4.
It keeps getting closer and closer--so amazingly close--but it never seems to actually be final. It gets tweaked and patched and asymptotically approaches 2.0, but doesn't seem to get there.
I'm not bashing the Apache developers, quite the opposite as I am very happy that they are absolutely not releasing it until it is ready--and we all know (I hope) that Linux 1.0 was eventually released. And 2.4. If only some other server apps used were put under such intense scrutiny before release.

Re:Much like Linux 1.0

[MeNeXT]

Why are you waiting for their OK? If this was MS it would be at version 3 already. The beta of open source is more reliable than most MS versions. The true final of an MS version is after SP2.

Threading is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used a webserver for just static pages in a long time, so it's good apache will support multithreading. Having complex database processes with apache 1.3.x could hinder it's scalability. Doing complex transactions like making calls to multiple databases in a threaded environment should scale better. Now some people will say, "why in the world would you want to make calls to multiple database?"

The answer to that question is, dynamic transactions often access existing databases, which often have screwed up data models and require insert/updates in multiple tables. Some will run and scream "horror, horror, horror," but now that the .bomb blew up, more and more web developers are finding they have to work with bad, inefficient, poorly documented data models. Having multi-threading in Apache will improve it's scalability.

Better Win32 Performance

[Hollinger]

Reading through the changes from 1.3 to 2.0, I'd say they've put quite a bit of effort into improving win32 performance (multiprocessing, finally! among others).

kudos.

Re:Better Win32 Performance

[ClosedSource]

I hope you're right. On their 1.3 notes for Windows they say the following:

"Apache for Windows version 1.3 series is implemented in synchronous calls. This poses an enormous problem for CGI authors, who won't see unbuffered results sent immediately to the browser. This is not the behavior described for CGI in Apache, but it is a side-effect of the Windows port. Apache 2.0 is making progress to implement the expected asynchronous behavior, and we hope to discover that the NT/2000 implementation allows CGI's to behave as documented."

The phrase "we hope discover" bothers me. Are they designing it to work correctly under Win32 or not?

Re:Better Win32 Performance

[TheAwfulTruth]

Yes, clearly using synchronous calls on windows was the result of a bunch of unix coders not knowing how to program for windows at all. I was hoping that the promise for 2.0 meant that they actually hired some real windows coders. I guess not. A well written asynchronous and/or properly threaded application on windows can easily match performance of the best written UNIX apps. But no fork and block unix coder is going to ever be able to do the windows "port" justice (As we've seen). Now I guess we'll have to "hope to discover" if they got a clue or not. :(

Re:Apache 2.0 Threads (parent poster here)

[Anonymous Coward]

Scary... very scary. sleeping a thread for 3 milliseconds is questionable for software as popular (and thus laden with high expectations) as Apache, but 3 seconds is downright criminal... sheesh. Remind me to never use Apache for web applications.

MySQL? PostgreSQL is better!

[Bistronaut]

-flame- -flame- -flame- OK, I was just kidding. I love PostgreSQL, but even I realize that when you don't need stability, speed, good SQL compliance or ... what was I saying again? -flame- -flame- -flame- Alright, back on topic, I'm pretty sure that you've been able to compile PHP4 for Apache 2.0 for quite a while now (at least the option has been there - maybe it's been broken?).

Beowulf!

[Afrosheen]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! w00t!

IBM has it too

[jmkaza]

From IBM... Apache V2.0 is the newly rearchitected open source Apache Web server that offers several significant enhancements, including a new "Thread-per-Request" model on UNIX and Linux operating systems. This new model offers increased performance and a significant reduction in the memory footprint of the server. On the Windows operating systems, it offers increased performance, along with capabilities and functionality that closely match those on the UNIX platform. The full information can be found here

Re:IBM has it too

[|||]

why are everyone so exited about the thread-per-request model? instead, many high-performance servers use non-blocking (or asynchronous) i/o models to scale. for instance, look at the seda project (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/) where a java implementation of a web-server using non-blocking i/o outperforms both the apache and flash web-servers for specweb99.

To get blazingly fast ...

[Anonymous Coward]

hack the apache source to call your
c functions. Perl is a scripting language;
i.e. slow.

Re:To get blazingly fast ...

[Anonymous Coward]

An anonymous dickhead wrote:hack the apache source to call your c functions. Perl is a scripting language; i.e. slow

Go learn about modperl, Anonymous chum: Apache/Perl integration.

Some hints for the technologically challenged:

1: apache already has a good C API for writing your own modules (don't have to "hack the source")

2: What everyone else is talking about is a module (not "hacked source") called mod_perl that embeds a perl interpreter into apache. Scripts are compiled once then cached. Even emulating vanilla CGI scripts gives massive speed increases (on par with C), and using the apache API gives much more control over the various phases of URI serving.

Quick kludge to get it up.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get it up and running on a port other
than 80. For example, use 8080. Demonstate
that it's easy to use and configurable and easy
to support. Then pull the plug on IIS and
and change the apache config to port 80.
Easy stuff.

High performance PHP

[horza]

It's PHP and not Apache that is the bottleneck here. For instance, I am writing a PHP extension that not only makes reading and writing XML files a doddle (eg to change (hypothetical) Apache xml config: xml_load("httpd.conf); xml_setelement("server.listen.ip", "127.0.0.1"); xml_output("httpd.conf");) but it will cache the XML files too. This means I can load config files at the start of my script with nearly no overhead. It's also going to drop the database load for an online book retailer client of mine to near zero, but that's another story... If anyone is interested in this please use ptemple[at]progressivepublishing.com instead of my Slashdot-reg Hotmail address.

Phillip.

Re:MySQL? PostgreSQL is better!

[Fweeky]

The API's are not yet fixed, so they tend to break. You can probably compile CVS of PHP to the current beta Apache 2, but the next time they change something PHP will most likely track the CVS change, leaving the beta out in the cold again.

I managed to get mod_php + Apache 2b28 coexisting, but it liked to segfault a lot (even when idle) and always ended up eating 100% CPU. I even managed to add Zend 2 (next-gen PHP engine) to the mix, but, well, I haven't seen Apache fall over so much since I got PHP 4.0.0 to generate 50,000 internal errors on a single script.

perchild MPM

[slamb]

I'm a little disappointed by Apache 2.0 so far.

I've been looking forward to the perchild MPM. It can run different server processes under different UID/GIDs. This is important because mod_{perl,php,python,snake} run in-process with the Apache server. It's the only way to run them securely for different people other than a completely seperate webserver for each person (with its own IP address, configuration file, memory footprint, etc.)

But perchild doesn't really work:

• It's not portable to non-Linux platforms. (There was talk on the mailing list of marking it experimental because of this.)
• It hasn't compiled (even on Linux) out of the box in several releases. In 2.0.29, easy to fix but still doesn't work right. (Not compiling is a sure sign it hasn't been maintained.) Not quite as easy on 2.0.32. There's a patch, but it doesn't look right to me.
• It's easy to misconfigure it into running virtual hosts as root. (Bug report)

So, Apache 2.0 may be promising in the future...but when a feature I've been looking forward to for a long time is broken, I'm kind of disappointed.

FFFAAAAARRRRTTTTTT!!!!!!!!

[peepoh]

I just farted, and sweet jebus it smells so bad!

Key developer: "Two-oh won't release 4 months"

[Paul Bain]

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp In early December, 2001, I sent an email to Ken Coar, one of the lead Apache developers, regarding Apache 2.0. Here is his telling reply.

To: Paul Bain
Subject: Re: Apache modules book

Paul Bain wrote:
>
> Will your book on writing Apache modules cover the Apache
> 2.0 API as well as the 1.3 API?

No. It was originally [meant to cover 2.0], but it had to be scaled back [to cover just 1.3].

> Is there much difference between the two API's, so much
> so that rewriting existing 1.3 modules will be inordinately
> time-consuming (and modules for 2.0 should instead be
> written from scratch)?

It depends on your definition of 'inordinately'. Unless it's something like mod_php, a few hours should probably suffice to convert pretty much anything. For best results, a complete rework of any content routines would be best, but much of the 1.3 API is still available -- but not as efficient nor as featureful.

It's still going to be months (IMHO) before the 2.0 API is stable and the server released. &nbsp&nbsp[emphasis added]
--
#ken &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp P-)}

Ken Coar, Sanagendamgagwedweinini &nbsp&nbsp http://Golux.Com/coar/
Author, developer, opinionist &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp http://Apache-Server.Com/

IOW, don't hold your breath waiting for the non-beta release of 2.0.

Re:Key developer: "Two-oh won't release 4 months"

[Anonymous Coward]

In early December, 2001, I sent an email to Ken Coar, one of the lead Apache developers, regarding Apache 2.0. Here is his telling reply.

Oh, yes, months from early december equals... Hmm ... March?

Re:Key developer: "Two-oh won't release 4 months"

[Rizz]

Newsflash: His message was posted in December. It's now February. That's ``months.'' :)

Re:How much karma do you lose? - long

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not lose a lot unless the editors read it.

They have little to no patience for slashdot quirkiness and will nuke your mod ability and your karma if they don't like what you are posting. This is a new thing, though they updated the FAQ so it is now by the book as well in the future.

Folks have started posting as AC's, but it seems a logical next step will be for them to start logging your id/ip and revoking based on that. What you won't do for others seeking power you will do if you seek it :)

Kinda sad to see the old slashdot going away, but everything has it's time. Hoping to get a chance to use my mod/meta-mod on a similar thread in the future. Fun, quirky, good enough to make all of us in front of a computer laugh a little.

Re:How much karma do you lose? - long

[Xerithane]

Exactly - Slashdot as we "knew" it is gone. I suppose I can't blame Rob, I'd be going nuts working on the same project for as long as he has. It doesn't matter if you post AC or not, they do log your IP. My previous post already has 5 mods done to it, I don't really care anymore.. I'm at my karma cap, let them kill it and nuke me. I don't care. I've been reading slashdot since before there were user accounts, and I've made mostly helpful contributions to the signal. I post when something I want to talk about comes up.

The issue is moot at this point, but it's interested to see the feelings that still persist.
I've found FortKnox has a great journal - and he's setup his own site but I can't remember the URL and I'm too lazy/tired to look it up. Oops.. there goes more kkarma :)

Threads and processes : why?

[chrysalis]

I still wonder why Apache 2.0 was designed to use a strange hybrid model instead of making a non-forking server, just like thttpd, webfs or zeus, whoose performance will probably still kick Apache.

And Apache still doesn't have any integrated web administration front-end like Zeus.

Re:Threads and processes : why?

[webperf]

I suggest you look at http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html for a great description on all the different types of architectures there are for webservers

glib?

[sfraggle]

The new version of Apache sports the new APR API

The website for the APR says this:

The mission of the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) is to provide a free library of C data structures and routines, forming a system portability layer to as many operating systems as possible

What is the difference between this and the glib library which the GNOME programs use? This seems like the same kind of thing. Granted, it does seem to include some extra stuff which glib doesnt have, but still..

Re:glib?

[|||]

the apache licence is bsd'ish, and glib is lgpl.

Re:glib?

[stephend]

APR deals more with processes, threads, interprocess communication and networking while glib is more of a useful toolbox with trees, stacks and types, etc.

That being said, there's definately an overlap.

Portable runtime libraries

[pieterh]

It's a very sensible thing to make since it's cheap and eliminates much of the nasty #ifdef 'portability' one sees in programs.

You can see an example of a multithreaded web server using a similar portability library on .

I remember showing this web server and its multithreaded / portability model to the IBM Apache team in December 1999 during the Bazaar at New York. Maybe they got some inspiration from it.

Why pointy-haired-bosses are a pain

[MarkusQ]

I'm a CS student graduating soon, why is there such a hard time making bosses see the beauty and less hassle of these projects linux/apache/etc compare to the MSWin/IIS choice...I mean, who with the smallest notion on what is good would put up a fight to choose IIS over apache!? Will I have the same wonderful challange?

Before you graduate, be sure to catch up on the industry literature for valuble insights into how the real world works.

-- MarkusQ

P.S. Pay special attention to what happens to Asok, and lean how to duck.

try authentication integration for one

[gruntvald]

being able to plug in your domain SAM, with acls on the site. Also domain authentication with "web folders" (DAV) is another. Note: I will be happy to be corrected with a HOWTO that tells you how to point DAV at your PDC or SAMBA box here ... (without running a separate accounts database)

'2.0' is just a number!

[ishmalius]

Wouldn't you rather see the thing actually improve, than just see it get a release label?

Configure Still Doesn't Work

[tomreagan]

Ok, so maybe this is not the place for this, but I can't seem to get any answers out of the developers about this. ./configure still doesn't work.

I downloaded 2.0.28 in December and tried to ./configure --enable-layout=opt. No dice - it still throws everything in /usr/local/apache2.
I posted to the apache-users mailing list in December, and no one responded. I tried again yesterday, with 2.0.32, and it still doesn't work.

Looking through the bug tracking list, I can see that this bug has been filed since November 2001.

How can Apache 2 be nearing release if you still can't get it to install where you want it to?

Been there, felt that pain

[pjc50]

You do realise that this means that the Perl processes have no idea of the remote IP? or of the SSL connection information?

A second apache also requires a second set of configuration files and virtual servers which have to be maintained and provisioned. It's just a waste of time, although it does reduce the stupid memory requirements somewhat...

Don't loose your moderator points on AC...

[cyba]

... give it to me instead :)