The Chinese (Web Servers) Are Coming

Glyn Moody writes "The February 2009 Netcraft survey is not the usual 'Apache continues to trounce Microsoft IIS' story: there's a new entrant — from China. 'This majority of this month's growth is down to the appearance of 20 million Chinese sites served by QZHTTP. This web server is used by QQ to serve millions of Qzone sites beneath the qq.com domain.' What exactly is this QZHTTP, and what does it all mean for the world of Web servers?"

Comments

Re:The GeoCities of China?

[Anonymous Conrad]

Try qzone.qq.com rather than just qq.com.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:41:06 GMT
Server: QZHTTP-2.3
Content-type: text/html
Content-length: 1728
Connection: close

Re:The GeoCities of China?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you are mistaken here.

The sites in question are not qq.com they are subdomains of .qzone.qq.com
(BTW http://qzone.qq.com/ by itself does not use QZHTTP 2.3 web server software it uses Apache)
like
http://182273490.qzone.qq.com/
Here is the netcraft report for that site:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=182273490.qzone.qq.com

These sites appear to be running on Linux and state they are running QZHTTP-2.3 web server software.

Yes you can edit the banner but often netcraft digs further into it then this (response times, packet information, etc) and doesn't blindly use the banner value.

It is likely to be using a modified version of Apache like Google do with their GWS (Google Web Server) software.

And thus given a separate version of web server software in its own right. So I suspect there has to be a significant changes to the normal operation/code of Apache (or whatever they have modded). It could be a whole new set of web server software but likely a significantly modified version.

Hope it helps