I am a bit on the sidelines, because of a) time constraints, and b) we're using ns_shares heavily and so are stuck with TCL 7.x, which is no longer supported. (I know there are hacks in TCL 8 for ns_shares, but when we benchmarked them, they were much slower. So no compelling reason to upgrade, for us, at least not yet.)
It seems that one of the main issues facing AS is a lack of people contributing their time to a group effort. People are doing things on their own, mainly for their own needs. It's understandable. Tweaking AS requires a high level of skill, and most of the people with that skill level have their hands full with their own projects. But it seems like having 2 separate versions will make cooperative efforts harder, not easier. JMHO. You know what I think would widen the appeal of AS? Optimize CGI and provide easy FastCGI support, or some other mechanism that makes it very fast and easy to run canned applications: bulletin board software, etc. Maybe AS CGI is already good enough to compete with Apache mod_perl, mod_php, ... I dunno. Or maybe it could never compete. But if it could, and there were tests/benchmarks to prove it, it seems that would go a long way to making AS more appealing to the general "I need a good web server" type of person. The recent discusion on the list about how to get an accounting application to run with mod_perl is a good example: the answer is "you don't need to use mod_perl or anything like it". But I think there is confusion for people evaluating web server software, because mod_perl and mod_php are accepted as the best way of doing things - on Apache. We have an application that we've always exec'd; not through CGI, just exec. I converted it to a module because I wanted to save some state info. I expected a big performance increase too, just because it would be a module and not need to exec. But in the initial version, which was basically the same but implemented as a module instead of exec, there was hardly any performance difference. Modules are great for saving state and doing fancy stuff, but I think there is a general impression that anything good has to be done as an AS module, and that isn't true. Another thing I think would be good are some documented performance tests with well-known applications. For example, a benchmark comparing PHPBB under Apache and AS. Maybe Apache would beat the pants off AS - I dunno. Or we might be surprised. Or a whole suite of bulletin-board tests: vbulletin, phpbb, ultimatebb, etc., compared on several different web servers with the same hardware config. Published benchmarks are good because: a) they show that standard applications run b) they give people an idea of how AS compares to other options. Even if people aren't planning to run bbs software, they may be planning to run a large perl or php application, so knowing that other large applications work well gives people an extra comfort level. If it could be shown that AS runs some of these mainstream web applications better than Apache, the authors of the software would be likely to recommend AS as a solution on their site, thus increasing its popularity with little effort. Of course, if it turns out that AS performance sucked on these applications, then the goal of getting more people involved and making the server more appealing to the masses is misguided, and it would be better to focus on the smaller group of sites where deploying AS makes sense. Jim > This *is* a suggestion for cooperative development of two versions in > the interests of AOL and the community, perhaps with oversight by a > steering committee if you like. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
