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

The GeoCities of China?

[eldavojohn]

Could someone help me out here, I am an ignorant occidental American developer barely able to use English ... I thought QQ was just a messaging program of bloated malware and adware that is insanely popular in China? Has it become (or is it aiming to become) more than that?

Its parent company is a media company ... is this destined to be China's GeoCities era with horrid user generated web content alongside ads and malicious user generated data like GeoCities in the 90s? Or maybe the Myspace/Facebook of China?

What exactly is this QZHTTP?

I honestly don't know. Never heard of it before now, my Google Fu finds nothing in English. Indicating it is most likely propriety to Tancent QQ ...

I hope this didn't affect the IPv4 exhaustion date.

I guess this could also just be a whole lot of fuss over something that will become common place. I mean with the event of virtualization, hilarious 32 core chips due out and predictably cheap storage/memory ... won't every large company soon be able to foot the bill on and house (what appears to be) 20 million web servers? I guess IP addressing, routing & bandwidth will always be a problem but the hardware is sure getting to the point.

Re:The GeoCities of China?

[miller60]

Netcraft's actual site report for qq.com shows it using Apache on Linux, so odds are qzhttp is either customized Apache or using altered headers.

Spoofing headers to fool Netcraft is nothing new. Bruce Perens did it with his Open Source Parking project. He was using lighttpd but wanted to help Apache's numbers.

Re:The GeoCities of China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things:

Use netcat, not telnet.
Send a HEAD request, not a bogus GET.

Websites

[iztehsux]

I really don't care what they're serving up on QQ as long as they knock it off with the repeated brute force SSH attempts every single day.

Re:Why mock this ?

[kabocox]

I don't understand the people mocking this. Sure this is probably a service a la geocities with a minority of webpages worth of any interest. But some are. Internet gains million of new users and publishers and people just dismiss this as non-significant while we should try to build bridges. As ugly a Myspace-QQ bridge may sound, it could be a worthwhile objective...

There are times that I'd like to give China a small hint on the best way to culturally take the US would be. First mandate an entire generation of Chinese students learn some English. Next give/sell that entire generation net books/internet cell phones. Now you just tell that generation to pick a few English/US sites and let the rest of the world know the real average Chinese view point on various subjects.

Utter chaos happens or no one notices?

How would slashdot change if we suddenly gained double or triple the current user base yet all active average Chinese folks?

Re:Corrected Story Blurb

[Profane MuthaFucka]

As in, a dozen men stand around a woman and QQ all over her face.

qhttpd

[ianare]

they're using qhttpd and linux.

filtered/parsed results from running :
nmap -A -T4 -F 182273490.qzone.qq.com

Port80-TCP : i686-pc-linux-gnu

501 Method Not Implemented
The requested method 'OPTIONS' is not implemented by this server.
http://www.tencent.com/ - qhttpd Server
Server: qhttpd
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 255

info on qhttpd :
http://www.xman.org/Qhttpd/design.shtml