*BSD News Article 85275


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From: Chuck Murcko <chuck@topsail.org>
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix,comp.infosystems.www.servers.misc,comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Apache much slower than Netscape ! ?
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 18:34:19 -0500
Organization: The Topsail Group
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Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <32B9D0FB.446B9B3D@topsail.org>
References: <aak2.848946036@Isis.MsState.Edu> <32A71A98.7342@amersham.co.uk> <58fk4m$hi2@node5.frontiernet.net>
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Dan Foster wrote:
> 
> In article <32A71A98.7342@amersham.co.uk>,
> Michael Cole  <mjc@amersham.co.uk> wrote:
> >Atif Ahmad Khan wrote:
> >>
> >> We have just setup a test Pentium PRO 200 server running Solaris X86 2.5.1
> >> (all latest patches applied) and got Stronghold secure server (Apache
> >> with SSL patches) and tried to run some benchmarks.
> >>
> >> We were very excited about the new server and were thinking that it was
> >> going to beat the pants off of our Netscape 1.2 on FreeBSD 2.1 Pent 90 com
> >> Imagine our surprise when we found out that Netscape is roughly 6 times
> >> faster.  I am  not sure what to blame, the Solaris OS or Apache or Strongh
> 
> >> Something is not right somewhere and I am not sure how to pin it down.
> >> Any helpful hints would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> If you *really* want to boost performance of Apache/Apache SSL to at least
> match (roughly) performance of Netscape Commerce server (I haven't even
> benchmarked it vs a Netscape Enterprise server yet), you oughta install
> Harvest which is a *really* kick-ass caching tool.
> 
> FYI: Apache 2.1b1 (I think I got that right) is out - officially beta,
> but has numerous code improvements, and has been under internal testing
> by the Apache team for at least 8 months, I believe...
> 
> -Dan Foster
> Internet: dsf@frontiernet.net

Not knowing how the Solaris box is tuned, it's hard to comment. Three
quick tips are to make sure DNS and IDENT lookups are turned off in the
Apache configs, and make sure the listen() queue is set large enough,
at least 128, using ndd.

A company down the street from where I work replaced Netscape 1.2 with
Apache on their SGIs, and saw a 2:1 performance boost in the number of
connections they could handle.

We saw roughly the same when we replaced our Netscape 1.2 with
Stronghold on our BSDI boxes.
-- 
chuck
Chuck Murcko
The Topsail Group, West Chester PA USA
chuck@topsail.org