Yep all these things are true. Well, the part about being poorly
designed is wrong, it just was designed well, then hacked to death
:-), I guess I'm splitting hairs, but the essential design is easy to
follow. I picked up the entire module in a just a few hours. (I just
think it isn't fair to the original designer to say that :->)
Anyhow... I've heard the keepalives are getting fixed, but I haven't
seen any code yet. Theres also other stuff in the mix that I think
you guys will see start to show up in say 1-2 months that will make
mod_proxy..., or whatever mod_proxy becomes into a mean lean
webserving proxy machine! Seriously though... with all the stuff
that's happening with this module, I think you guys will be really
happy with the results.
One thing to note that might be slightly sad..., I've heard it might
be breaking from apache into a seperate program. Become a seperate
ASF project. This is something that's being tossed around, but likely
it will use all the same directives that folks are used too etc. Oh
well, I don't know if that will happen, but admittedly it makes sense.
It just seems theres so much that could be done with it for 90% of the
platforms, but 100% just won't make it in. So it's either split with
apache and have mind numbing performance, or have something mediocre
(like we have now). Also if we split, it's going to be a lot lighter
weight than it already is.
In short... this module is in for lots of cool stuff. And I'm
speaking of lots of developers working on it. Four that I know of for
sure, two of which have already done a huge body of work on this
module.
Thanks,
Shane.
On Sat, Apr 29, 2000 at 12:35:39AM -0400, Greg Stark wrote:
>
> A few lessons on this arena:
>
> 1) Move your pictures to another server *even if you're using a proxy*
> Search back in the archives for my previous post on this topic.
>
> 2) If you use mod_proxy you can give it the same web root and have it serve
> some static objects itself instead of having to cache them. But 1) is even
> better than doing this. Sometimes you might not have a choice, such as with
> java applets.
>
> 3) mod_proxy is poorly designed and poorly implemented. The main deficiency is
> that each process is responsible for opening and maintaining its connection
> to the backend. This defeats keep-alives completely and forces a lot of
> overhead in the kernel and the servers.
>
> There's a much better design that involves creating a fixed number of
> sockets and treating that as a shared pool. In that design the backend can
> have a long keep-alive timeout and maintain persistent connections to the
> front-end.
>
>
> Despite these concerns I've been using mod_proxy myself and it does work. I'm
> planning to change to mod_backhand though which implements 3) but it's new
> code.
>
> --
> greg
>
