Slashdot Mirror
Eight Years Of Apache
Kyle Hamilton writes "The Apache Software Foundation today
announced that its HTTP Server platform has reached a milestone of eight
consecutive years of World Wide Web technology leadership. Since its
first release in April of 1995, the Apache HTTP Server has become as
pervasive as the Web itself. According to two separate and independent
surveys, the Apache HTTP Server, which originally established itself as
the leading web server technology in April 1996, continues to acquire even
greater market, growing faster than all other competing web server
technologies.
Achieving eight straight years of technology leadership confirms that the
open source model works. Apache is now successfully deployed in a diverse
set of environments, from large commercial entities to small nonprofit
organizations. We are grateful to the community for their continued
support and participation in the development process, said Sander Striker,
Vice President of the Apache HTTP Server Project. We are firmly committed
to continuing to provide the most accessible and standards-compliant Web
server platform in existence."
Don't you mean another 1010? Thanks Apache for providing a webhosting solution to us all. Even us who are running Windows.
Seems like 1.3.31 was officially released today (11 May) after last week's premature 'announcement' here.
:).
Here's the official announcement/changelog.
A new version of modssl to go with it too- just in time for the new server I had to set up today
-h3
A word of caution: thttpd is not the brilliant solution that a lot of people think that it is. The best features of thttpd are its low CPU and memory footprints, and its simplicity for virtual hosting. But those are pretty much its only features.
For sites without too many dependencies per page (javascript, images), it's great. But for most people, there's a huge shortcoming: it does not support persistant (Keep-Alive) connections. Every file request has to wait for a new TCP connection to be established. When your average ping time is 250+ ms, that hurts BAD. Broadband users don't notice so much but modem users get shafted.
Also, thttpd has serious issues if your total fileset exceeds 1GB. It keeps a cache of last-used files via mmap(), but if you exceed your VM address space (lets say, a couple dozen 200 MB videos), you're in a world of hurt.
There are commercial versions like Premium THTTPD that cure many of these shortcomings, and include a host of other features like FastCGI for running PHP, etc.
But in the realm of free software, there is no one-size-fits-all best server. Apache isn't THAT hard to configure, and it beats thttpd in a lot of important areas.
I'd hate to dispell the lore - but the web server is in fact largely build from quality checked and polished versions of those submitted patches. Sure - a patch which fixes 1 thing and breaks 3 others; or optimizes for one rare case at the expense for 2 common cases may need some work - but over those 8 years very few patches and suggestions have gone to waste. If they where good they typically pop up at some point later if they where too radical at the time of first posting.
Soo keep them coming !
Dw.
Thanks to my parent (modded -1?) for this link, looks like a fork of thttpd with performance-enhancing updates. Still not ideal for large filesets but a lot more efficient than plain thttpd, and full keep-alive support.
t tpd-2.21b-pNN/index.html
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/adefacc/httpd/thttpd/th