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From: paul@xciv.org (Paul Civati)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc
Subject: Re: Unix too slow for a Web server?
Date: 24 Sep 1996 22:59:16 GMT
Organization: XCIV
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <529p44$81@xciv.demon.co.uk>
References: <323ED0BD.222CA97F@pobox.com>
<323F123D.6D55@www.play-hookey.com>
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In article <323F123D.6D55@www.play-hookey.com>,
Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> writes:
> I wonder if whoever made that comparison was carefully running httpd
> under inetd, rather than standalone? That way, inetd would have to take
> time to load httpd into memory, which at low usage would slow things
> down. Running Apache in standalone mode leaves from 5 to 10 copies of
> httpd idling in RAM, waiting for a call, so there's no delay in
> responding. Further, as calls come in additional idle copies are loaded,
> to the max specified (default 150). Again, minimum delay.
On a busy server this will increase though, depending on your settings for
minimum number of pre-forked and maximum number of forked httpd's.
There are alternatives though, you could run something like thttpd, which
whilst might not the most feature packed (actually, I personally feel
Apache is getting a little bloated these days) runs as a single process that
doesn't fork.
Or in combination with your normal httpd you could run either of the Harvest
or Squid caches as httpd accelorators (again, both of these run as single
process which don't fork).
These basically sit on port 80 in place of your normal httpd and serve
the incoming request, they do this by forwarding the request to your
normal httpd (listening on say localhost port 81) and caching what they
serve out.
The only minor drawbacks of this are munging the cache access log into a
format that your web stats analyser can parse and getting it to generate
accurate results as far as hits/misses are concerned.
Those who are interested might want to look at the following:
<URL:http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/>
<URL:http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/>
<URL:http://www.nlanr.net/Squid/>
-Paul-
--
Paul Civati =O= Home: paul@xciv.org =O= http://www.xciv.org/
London UK =O= Home: paul@xciv.demon.co.uk =O= Slackware is.