On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
Is there a reason we aren't using Apache 2? From a
newbie's point of view,
2 is a bigger number than 1.3, so it must be better ;-). If the code is in
PHP, how would a newer version of Apache break the code?
PHP runs within the Apache process. If Apache's broken, we're screwed. :)
Apache 2.0 isn't considered as 'mature' as 1.3; it's a major architectural
overhaul, and there are still many third-party modules that haven't been
ported. As far as I know mod_rewrite in 2.0 hasn't fixed the & problem, so
I'd have to port my workaround to work with it (something I haven't done
on my test server at home, which is running on Apache 2.0 -- but has
never been tested under load.)
Wild
speculation is welcome, particularly with falsifiable hypotheses. :)
Okay, then what about thttpd (tiny/turbo/throttling http daemon)?
http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
"In typical use it's about as fast as the best full-featured servers
(Apache, NCSA, Netscape). Under extreme load it's much faster."
It supports CGI, and IIRC you can configure PHP as a CGI interpreter, so
will it not work (possibly with a few minor changes) with MediaWiki?
Maybe for images and stylesheets it'd be fine, but that would not work at
all well for the dynamic pages. It would be a huge performance problem:
every single page view would require spawning a new PHP process, which
would have to open a new connection to the database.
Somebody's mentioned reverse proxies to offload slow transfers from
apache; someone else has mentioned lingerd which does roughly the same
thing more directly. That may or may not be useful; the lingerd docs
recommend also using a separate lightweight web server for styles, images
etc.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)