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Apache Comes With Too Much Community Overhead?
drizzle writes "There's an interesting story on the Apache Marketing blog about whether or not Apache projects come with too much overhead, especially compared with other services or a roll-your-own approach. The article states, 'It's true that compared with SourceForge, Apache has a more rigorous management structure. The ASF has formalized processes and procedures that we believe represent best practices governance. All new projects must pass through an incubation period to ensure that all of the project's members have internalized these processes. However, each project's leadership has a tremendous amount of discretion in managing within this framework.' There is also a follow up article written by one of the httpd developers about 'What Apache brings to the table.' The article cites community, experience, legal framework, diversity, brand strength, and networking as reasons why developers and companies should consider bringing their projects over to Apache."
If you want simple, static content, thttpd is stupidly tiny, stupidly scalable, and way faster than Apache. Unfortunately it uses the old fork model for dealing with CGI scripts which make it quite slow as doing that (but no worse than the old NCSA httpd). It has a number of interesting features, such as per-filetype bandwidth throttling (so you can specify that MP3 files only get transferred at 10kB/sec), but also has some suprising omissions --- the MIME type database is hard-coded, and it only handles HTTP 1.1. But if you have a simple site based mainly around static pages, thttpd is probably ideal for your purposes.
Or if you want something smaller than Apache and a little more than just static pages try http://www.lighttpd.net/. It is secure and beats Apache 2 performance wise and the configuration takes only a few minutes. It runs on my small server for months now and is certainly worth a look.
First, If you actually read through the blurb (not even the article) you'd see that they're not talking about web servers - they're talking about Apache, the organization behind the web server.
Second, I would recommend the up-and-coming lighttpd, which I have used for both static and dynamic content. I have never used thttpd so I am not sure how it compares on the static end.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
fimbulvetr@media:/etc/apache2$ grep MaxKeepAliveRequests apache2.conf ......... number of server processes to start
# MaxKeepAliveRequests: The maximum number of requests to allow
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
fimbulvetr@media:/etc/apache2$ grep StartServers apache2.conf
# StartServers
StartServers 5
Seems that they're documented enough to figure out a barebones configuration. I realize you're pointing out it's complexity and these examples are nothing but trees in the forest, and there are plenty more, but the point is that they _are_ documented. Apache is an extremely powerful and flexible webserver. For light servers, it's easy to get it up and running right away (by keeping the defaults) - and the reverse is true - it takes very little work to get a default httpd.conf to run in a highload environment (assuming you're running in a pretty standard one).
Now, if you need a super custom setup - it's not such a huge leap for the developers (and even the guy at apache who is the boss of what gets put in the default conf) to presume that the person needing it in a custom environment knows apache pretty well and knows what they need to use in the configuration file.
Finally, I do think it is reasonable to say that people who setup a website should take the responsibility of knowing, at least the basics, of running websites. Even if this means gathering more than a cursory understanding of the workings of apache or any other webserver, it is certainly going to be more beneficial for them than sitting around bitching about the complexities he doesn't want to learn.
Ok, whilst on free OS logo fetishes.
The Red Hat model.
http://www.madyiordache.com/TheRedHat.htm
I'd think at least twice before criticizing Apache's basic structure. There aren't many open source projects that are as successful as Apache and dominate their space as thoroughly.
They don't seem to apply their rigorous procedures to mod_jk, the plugin that JBoss.org has taken over development of. The quality of numerous releases over the past year has been very disappointing. The 1.2.15 release looks decent, but its predecessors were very buggy to the point of being what I'd consider beta software not ready for running in the enterprise environment.
According to Apache's web site, quite a bit of Apache is actualy developed on FreeBSD servers. As far as the individual developers go, I believe Brian Behlendorf makes a good representative of senior Apache developers.
Actually, Java projects are a minority of the Apache projects, [...] Apache recently has gotten a lot of new committers in XML and web services development. Like with Axis2 and Synapse. They also have a project called Maven, [...]
Axis2, Synapse and Maven are Java projects.