Why I Hate the Apache Web Server

schon writes "Today's the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation entitled 'Why I Hate the Apache Web Server' for anyone who has expressed frustration with the various inconsistencies and nuances of the Internet's favourite config file. And yes, it includes a comparison to Sendmail."

Comments

is this the internet ?

[Anonymous Coward]

PDF has no place on the Internet, thats why we use HTML , but that would interfere with Adobes buisness model

How to fund Apache improvements

[joelparker]

I worked at Sun and tried to fund Apache improvements to make it smoother for my team's webmasters. No luck.

Apache is great but it could be *significantly* easier for beginning webmasters. And for companies to fund changes.

Re:Whoops

[dnoyeb]

Nice. I absolutely hate pdfs embedded in web browsers. They ALWAYS lock up the browser and force a ctrl-alt-del to shut it down. Firefox and IE alike. Could writting solid code be that hard for adobe????

Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh

[Anonymous Coward]

Could the users who care please install The TargetAlert extension for Firefox so they get a PDF icon next to the link? That is not too much to ask, I hope.

Winston Churchill

[linsys]

In the words of "Winston Churchill"...

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

"It has been said that Apache is the worst web server except all the others that have been created"

There are some good reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The config file format is horrendous. We've had XML for how many years now?
2. The module architecture is a pain. Modules make so much sense as objects. What about that? How about having a C++ shared object system?
3. What's up with threading? What about the select loop model?
4. It's partially Apache's fault: PHP is horrible, and much of its horribleness is because of the lack of support for better models within Apache itself.
5. Memory management is a pain within modules.

Those are off the top of my head. Apache is not a shining example of how great open source software can be. It is a bad design that's been around for a long long time.

Posting anonymously so that no one will search back in history and see how badly I flame Apache when I'm trying to sell to customers who are basing their systems on Apache/PHP.

Re:There are some good reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Try this. Config file is XML, and it has a web-based configuration interface for those who don't like XML.
2. Try this. Modules are Pike (similar to C++) objects. They can be reloaded on the fly, don't need to be compiled before they're used, and do not require a restart of the server.
3. Try this. It supports threads just fine.
4. Try this. Support for PHO (for those who want it) as well as a built-in dynamic page generating language (RXML) - as well as pike scripts (if you want more power.)
5. Try this. Memory management is not an issue.

Caudium is a wonderful web server platform - it's faster, more powerful, and easier to use than Apache. Once you try it you won't go back.

Re:Comic Sans is.....

[Bob of Dole]

Actually, it was originally designed to provide comic-style word-balloons for the program Microsoft 3D Movie Maker.
At some point, they figured out that whole "sound" deal, so 3DMM got voices, and the world got Comic Sans. (Sorry about that!)

I'm actually one of the leading programmers from the 3D Movie Maker Community (which still exists)... We're people celebrating a program that gave the world Comic Sans.
Aren't we bastards? :)

Start using Konq.

[Inoshiro]

It takes almost no time to load. KDE 3.4.x has made me really happy to interface with PDF files, because the PDF integration is fast and slick.

It beats the shit out of Postscript files (I shouldn't have to install 5 separate packages for 1 file format!), and is highly preferable to a powerpoint doc on the other end of the hyper link (which I wouldn't be able to read anyways).

AMEN BROTHER!!!

[kimanaw]

I've written 5 different web servers (embedded in other apps) in C (twice), Java(twice), and Perl (once). It ain't really all that difficult...its just HTTP.

So every time I start trying to hack together an Apache config file, then setup the .htaccess, and then...well, about that time I say awfuckit and just grab one of those dusty old code nuggets and roll my own. its actually faster to setup that way...and possibly more secure, since I hardwire the pages/images/etc.

Apache performance can't be beat ('cept maybe for the kernel-embedded HTTP server, can't recall the name), but the config process is way too damn difficult for something with such a simple protocol; hell, I can completely reconfig a UNIX kernel more reliably, and in less time, than configing Apache.

Re:Comic Sans is.....

[webmaestro]

Well, techincally you're correct. Comic Sans is not a font, it's a typeface. The actual file that describes how the typeface is rendered is a font, but what the user sees is a typeface.

Re:Comic Sans is.....

[afidel]

NOT! Penny Arcade is sketched in Alias Sketchbook and colored in Photoshop, which is a perfectly rational workflow and one which works better for Gabe then doing everything in Illustrator.

As a consultant

[phaze3000]

As a consultant, can I take this oportunity to thank the Apache foundation for this confusing syntax, etc? Without it, I fear my earnings would be far less.

Seriously though, for a lot of tasks these days I use the more lightweight thttpd daemon. Uber-simple config files, very low overhead, supports per-URL throttling out of the box. It's superb for image servers, or pretty much any application where you don't need dynamic pages - and believe me, there are still plenty of places you don't need dynamic code.

Re:General-purpose config file parsing

[dreamer-of-rules]

I like Apple's config system over Windows. Programs are supposed to, and do tend to use the Apple config setting API, which saves them into an XML file named for the reverse domain, eg. com.apple.itunes. There's a GUI and command line tools to work with the settings files, but the best part (over the Windows registry) is that each application has its own file.

I dislike the Windows registry because it is a mess.. It can be really hard to migrate settings for a specific application in Windows, whereas it is often easier in Mac OS X.

Of course, apache and all the other Unix-native apps on the Mac still use the painful configs.

Some more

[plj]

OK, let's see it:

First, we have this.

And a quote from the default config file:

# Specify a default charset for all pages sent out. This is
# always a good idea and opens the door for future internationalisation
# of your web site, should you ever want it. Specifying it as
# a default does little harm; as the standard dictates that a page
# is in iso-8859-1 (latin1) unless specified otherwise i.e. you
# are merely stating the obvious. There are also some security
# reasons in browsers, related to javascript and URL parsing
# which encourage you to always set a default char set.

OK. So I'll define as follows:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Then, we have this.

OK, so I have some legacy documents, so I'll just define as follows in <HEAD>:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

And let's try it out... WTF?? It does not work! My browser thinks it is UTF-8.

Oh wait, it actually works, if I'll define this instead of that above:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Brilliant! So if the AddDefaultCharset is defined in httpd.conf, the Content-Type encoding of the actual document must be defined in lowercase, or it'll be ingnored! Now, where the f*** this is documented??! Examples at w3.org specifically uses uppercase. Apache permits uppercase in httpd.conf.

Apache messed it up again.

Even the guy who designed it doesn't like it.

[AnxiousMoFo]

Here is a, uh, rather ambivalent look at Comic Sans by its designer, Vincent Connare.

Apparently, he saw Times New Roman used as the font for speech balloons in Microsoft Bob, which he thought was a terrible misuse of the font. So he designed a new font, Comic Sans, for those speech balloons. From the article:

Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program's interface, the typeface used to communicate the message.

Re:Sigh. Just a half-witted rant, as I expected...

[steve_l]

yeah, and have the other httpd people were in the room: nobody disagreed. It was one of the funniest and best presentations all week.