Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Jim Jagielski]

> On Apr 20, 2018, at 7:19 AM, Rich Bowen  wrote:
> 
> Perhaps this is something we can try for a few months and see what kind of 
> schedule we're able to hit. Luca, is this something you'd like to tackle with 
> me? 

I'd like to help too... if possible.

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Rich Bowen]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018, 12:46 Jim Jagielski  wrote:

>
>
> Personally, I'd like to see the the PMC take a more active and
> direct role in addressing #1, maybe w/ monthly blog posts
> coordinated w/ Sally. It would also be cool to reboot Apache Week
> (I know it was an external, 3rd party effort) in in conjunction
> w/ the blog posts or instead of it.
>

Rewinding to this idea, I think this is the right move.

Do we actually want to resurrect apacheweek.com?  Looks like that's a red
hat property now. Perhaps Mark Cox owns it? Or do we want to aim at the
blog site and twitter instead?

I think we'd have no trouble finding monthly articles. Weekly might be a
challenge to work up to.

Perhaps this is something we can try for a few months and see what kind of
schedule we're able to hit. Luca, is this something you'd like to tackle
with me?

>

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Rich Bowen]

On 04/19/2018 05:43 AM, Nick Kew wrote:

If you want to get writing at a serious level, that’ll be great!  I might even 
contribute
if you can get some momentum going, but I’d never attempt to take a lead, not
least because potential conflict-of-interest with my publisher’s copyright.


+1,000,000

Related, I just attended a presentation at work about how documentation 
(in OpenStack in particular) is part of the engineering process from the 
beginning, and how they work things into the product management process. 
It was very inspiring, and it's something that we actually do pretty 
well in httpd, although we're less intentional about it, possibly?


I'm still very proud of our docs, and we've managed to retain a pretty 
good team of writers over the years.

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Jim Jagielski]

> On Apr 19, 2018, at 6:29 AM, Dirk-Willem van Gulik  
> wrote:
> 
> 
> Large crude oil tankers and formula 1 racing cars are both things that can go 
> from A to B. Yet they have different qualities. 
> 
> Perhaps we need to emphasise this a bit more - that there is room for 
> different things in this market. 
> 
> I’ve found the same in production - nginx can be wonderfully fast in certain 
> settings - but can also be a relatively fragile and finicky beast best ran in 
> serious loadbalancing/failover.
> 

Agreed. Again, I think that working w/ Sally can help here, assuming
we get enough people interested in it that we can make a go of it.

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Jim Jagielski]

++1

> On Apr 19, 2018, at 6:09 AM, Graham Leggett  wrote:
> 
> On 18 Apr 2018, at 10:46 PM, Mark Blackman  wrote:
> 
>> Is most popular the right thing to aim for? I would advise continuing to 
>> trade on Apache’s current strengths (versatility and documentation for me 
>> and relative stability) and let the chips fall where they may. It’s an open 
>> source project with a massive first-mover advantage and no investors to 
>> please. Just do the right thing, stay visible and the rest will sort itself 
>> out.
> 
> I agree strongly with this.
> 
> I took a look at nginx and gave it a fair evaluation, then I discovered this:
> 
> https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/depth/ifisevil/
> 
> with most specifically this:
> 
> "Anything else may possibly cause unpredictable behaviour, including 
> potential SIGSEGV.”
> 
> Both this document and the idea that SIGSEGV would remain unfixed would never 
> fly at Apache. Nginx suffers the problem in that product managers have to 
> trade off the pressure of new features for the marketing people over the need 
> to fix problems they already have. This isn’t sustainable for them.
> 
> We have no such pressure - we release when it’s ready, not because some 
> product manager made promises that their budget couldn’t keep.
> 
> The strength of httpd is that it is a tank - it just keeps going and going. 
> You can deploy it and completely forget about it, it just works. This frees 
> up our users to focus their attention on doing whatever it is they want to do.
> 
> Regards,
> Graham
> —
> 

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Graham Leggett]

On 18 Apr 2018, at 8:32 PM, William A Rowe Jr  wrote:

>> You seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill [...]
> 
> 
> Both statements attack not the technical question, but the questioner.
> Please mind your framing.

The expression “making a mountain out of a molehill” means that you’re 
overstating your case - the problem you describe isn’t as bad as you are making 
it out to be. This directly refers to the technical question, not to you 
personally.

I suspect a lot of this comes from the Windows centric approach. In the unix 
world, software distribution and patch management is a first class feature of 
all the major distributions, and our approach and the unix world align very 
well. Windows however hides away their patch management inside the Microsoft 
organisation (as I see it), and leaves a lot of the problem to be solved by 
Windows maintainers from first principles. It is easy to take a look at the 
Windows world and go “this is hard”, but this is simply a function of the 
Windows ecosystem[1]. The problems you describe don’t seem to be anywhere near 
as serious in the unix world as you’re making them out to be.

[1] That said, has the Windows ecosystem moved on to make package deployment 
and patch management easier? Installing Edge from powershell was a 
one-line-cut-and-paste no brainer for me recently, can we / are we taking 
advantage of that?

Regards,
Graham
—



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Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Dirk-Willem van Gulik]

On 19 Apr 2018, at 12:09, Graham Leggett  wrote:
> On 18 Apr 2018, at 10:46 PM, Mark Blackman  wrote:
> 
>> Is most popular the right thing to aim for? I would advise continuing to 
>> trade on Apache’s current strengths (versatility and documentation for me 
>> and relative stability) and let the chips fall where they may. It’s an open 
>> source project with a massive first-mover advantage and no investors to 
>> please. Just do the right thing, stay visible and the rest will sort itself 
>> out.
> 
> I agree strongly with this. I took a look at nginx and gave it a fair 
> evaluation, then I discovered this:
> ..
> "Anything else may possibly cause unpredictable behaviour, including 
> potential SIGSEGV.”
> 
> Both this document and the idea that SIGSEGV would remain unfixed would never 
> fly at Apache. Nginx suffers the problem in that product managers have to 
> trade off the pressure of new features for the marketing people over the need 
> to fix problems they already have. This isn’t sustainable for them.
..
> The strength of httpd is that it is a tank - it just keeps going and going. 
> You can deploy it and completely forget about it, it just works. This frees 
> up our users to focus their attention on doing whatever it is they want to do.

Large crude oil tankers and formula 1 racing cars are both things that can go 
from A to B. Yet they have different qualities. 

Perhaps we need to emphasise this a bit more - that there is room for different 
things in this market. 

I’ve found the same in production - nginx can be wonderfully fast in certain 
settings - but can also be a relatively fragile and finicky beast best ran in 
serious loadbalancing/failover.

Dw.

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Graham Leggett]

On 18 Apr 2018, at 10:46 PM, Mark Blackman  wrote:

> Is most popular the right thing to aim for? I would advise continuing to 
> trade on Apache’s current strengths (versatility and documentation for me and 
> relative stability) and let the chips fall where they may. It’s an open 
> source project with a massive first-mover advantage and no investors to 
> please. Just do the right thing, stay visible and the rest will sort itself 
> out.

I agree strongly with this.

I took a look at nginx and gave it a fair evaluation, then I discovered this:

https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/depth/ifisevil/

with most specifically this:

"Anything else may possibly cause unpredictable behaviour, including potential 
SIGSEGV.”

Both this document and the idea that SIGSEGV would remain unfixed would never 
fly at Apache. Nginx suffers the problem in that product managers have to trade 
off the pressure of new features for the marketing people over the need to fix 
problems they already have. This isn’t sustainable for them.

We have no such pressure - we release when it’s ready, not because some product 
manager made promises that their budget couldn’t keep.

The strength of httpd is that it is a tank - it just keeps going and going. You 
can deploy it and completely forget about it, it just works. This frees up our 
users to focus their attention on doing whatever it is they want to do.

Regards,
Graham
—



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Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Nick Kew]

> On 19 Apr 2018, at 10:14, Luca Toscano  wrote:
> 
> Hi Nick,

[chop]

Thanks.  Good reply.  Your suggestions make a lot of sense to me: I just 
wouldn’t
have put them in the context of marketing or evangelism.

Trouble is, it’s relatively few of us who ever get inspired to write about 
things.
Honourable exception being Rich writing docs and books for longer than anyone
can remember!  I think the last person to write serious developer documentation
was Humbedooh, whose work you deservedly praise:

> Ideally the quality bar that I would love to have across our dev docs is this 
> one http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer/modguide.html, but in my 
> opinion there is still a a lot of work to do :)

If you want to get writing at a serious level, that’ll be great!  I might even 
contribute
if you can get some momentum going, but I’d never attempt to take a lead, not
least because potential conflict-of-interest with my publisher’s copyright.

— 
Nick Kew

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Luca Toscano]

Hi Nick,

2018-04-19 10:33 GMT+02:00 Nick Kew :

>
> > On 18 Apr 2018, at 20:00, Luca Toscano  wrote:
> >
> > Before joining the httpd project as contributor I struggled to find good
> technical sources about how the httpd internals work,
>
> Likewise.  That’s kind-of what motivated me to start writing about it.
>

And I remember reading your book 2/3 times when I wrote my first module at
work, so thanks a lot :)

But that’s not to say it’s any worse than other software projects I’ve
> encountered over the years.
> There’s always a learning curve, and a struggle to find relevant docs.
> OK, things have improved
> a lot since “just google it” became an option, but information still needs
> unearthing.
>
> Are you suggesting httpd is somehow *worse* than other software you’ve
> hacked in terms of
> developer documentation?  In my experience it’s actually a lot better than
> most, due primarily to
> the high standard of API docs in /include/ and in APR, and of course open
> and searchable source.


I agree that we have a good code documentation, what we miss in my opinion
is a high level (but detailed and with examples) up to date overview of how
things stitch together when a request is processed. I can give you a recent
example from my experience, namely
https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61860. Eric patiently helped
me to track down how the response flows through the output filters (ending
up in a error response eventually), that helped me a lot to understand more
how things works. And it is of course a super simple example for most of
the experienced httpd's devs, but for people like me that are still very
n00b (and ramping up!) this knowledge is a real treasure that makes the
difference between hours of frustration (ending up nowhere) and the same
time spent in coming up with working patches and contribution for the
project.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer/API.html is a good example
about something that is a "bit" old but still interesting and helpful. The
same up to date thing for 2.4 could be really valuable for anybody that
joins the project (or thinks to do so).

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer/filters.html is great but it
misses examples in my opinion. I recently discovered for example the
.gbdinit goodies that we ship, they could be a straightforward tool to come
up with real data in the docs for a simple debug of a request/response.

Ideally the quality bar that I would love to have across our dev docs is
this one http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer/modguide.html, but in
my opinion there is still a a lot of work to do :)


> > My point is: blogging is fine, but before even starting that I'd focus
> on dumping everybody's knowledge in sections of the docs like
> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer. It is boring and less fun
> than writing C code for sure, but I bet that a ton of people would enjoy
> details about how things work. It will be easier for people to spot "liars"
> in the web that focus their marketing strategy only on how httpd is "old"
> and not performant too..
>
> I’ve called out “liars” once or twice.  Or more usually, purveyors of
> “cargo-cult” whose idea
> of Apache is rooted in how things haven’t been since 1997 or so.  But I’m
> not sure they’re
> really the issue.  nginx has risen primarily because it’s a genuine
> solution, and secondarily
> because it’s had the evangelical community that goes with a challenger
> against an
> incumbent.  Now that it’s risen to be a competitor on more equal terms,
> the evangelism
> still has momentum.  Insofar as we care about market share, we could
> respond in kind,
> preferably avoiding the wilder fringe.
>

I think that nginx has risen because it is a great tool, and I like the
fact that there are more "competitors" that challenge the status quo. What
I don't like is when projects that were born standing on the shoulders of
giants focus their marketing on discrediting others to gain popularity.
Without clear docs that can allow anybody to verify what is true and what
not, the end result is a ton of FUD as we are seeing. I would start with
improving our dev docs and spread the word via social media (tweets,
medium, etc..).

Luca

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Nick Kew]

> On 18 Apr 2018, at 20:00, Luca Toscano  wrote:
> 
> Before joining the httpd project as contributor I struggled to find good 
> technical sources about how the httpd internals work,

Likewise.  That’s kind-of what motivated me to start writing about it.

But that’s not to say it’s any worse than other software projects I’ve 
encountered over the years.
There’s always a learning curve, and a struggle to find relevant docs.  OK, 
things have improved
a lot since “just google it” became an option, but information still needs 
unearthing.

Are you suggesting httpd is somehow *worse* than other software you’ve hacked 
in terms of
developer documentation?  In my experience it’s actually a lot better than 
most, due primarily to
the high standard of API docs in /include/ and in APR, and of course open and 
searchable source.
The contrast is closed source software, where docs inevitably diverge badly 
from reality.
I’ve mused about this in the past: for example
https://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/the-documentation-gap/
https://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/security-by-cookery/

> My point is: blogging is fine, but before even starting that I'd focus on 
> dumping everybody's knowledge in sections of the docs like 
> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer. It is boring and less fun than 
> writing C code for sure, but I bet that a ton of people would enjoy details 
> about how things work. It will be easier for people to spot "liars" in the 
> web that focus their marketing strategy only on how httpd is "old" and not 
> performant too..

I’ve called out “liars” once or twice.  Or more usually, purveyors of 
“cargo-cult” whose idea
of Apache is rooted in how things haven’t been since 1997 or so.  But I’m not 
sure they’re
really the issue.  nginx has risen primarily because it’s a genuine solution, 
and secondarily
because it’s had the evangelical community that goes with a challenger against 
an
incumbent.  Now that it’s risen to be a competitor on more equal terms, the 
evangelism
still has momentum.  Insofar as we care about market share, we could respond in 
kind,
preferably avoiding the wilder fringe.

— 
Nick Kew

AW: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Plüm , Rüdiger , Vodafone Group]

> -Ursprüngliche Nachricht-
> Von: Daniel Ruggeri [mailto:drugg...@primary.net]
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 19. April 2018 02:22
> An: dev@httpd.apache.org
> Betreff: Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"
> 
> On 4/18/2018 11:46 AM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
> 
> > Personally, I'd like to see the the PMC take a more active and
> > direct role in addressing #1, maybe w/ monthly blog posts
> > coordinated w/ Sally. It would also be cool to reboot Apache Week
> > (I know it was an external, 3rd party effort) in in conjunction
> > w/ the blog posts or instead of it.
> 
> This is interesting. Can you provide some examples for the types of blog
> posts that you think would be good to make? Stealing from other parts of
> the thread (thanks, Luca!), I could see value in providing bite-sized
> tidbits of how requests/responses are run, what this whole "hook" and
> "pool" stuff is all about and anything to demystify the filter chain.
> Those things could also be used to refresh our developer guidelines
> pages.
> I'm not positive that kind of content is what you have in mind since I
> think that would primarily drive the interest of module authors rather
> than the folks who choose which webserver to use.

Just a quick thought that comes to my mind. I know that there are excellent
presentations at ApacheCon's on various of such topics. Would it be possible
to store / link the slides (need probably be contributed by the authors) and / 
or
videos of the sessions on our website?

Regards

Rüdiger

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Daniel Ruggeri]

On 4/18/2018 11:46 AM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
> IMO, this boils down to 2 things:
>
>   1. nginx, particularly, does a LOT of promoting, marketing, PR, etc...
>  We don't. They get to promote their FUD all the time and remain
>  pretty much unchallenged.

Speaking from experience at $dayjob, I can confirm that the marketing
and sales folks are out in full force. I and a colleague have both been
contacted at our work addresses with messages tailored to our cloud and
cloud native jobs. Editorially, my work email address is not published
publicly - so this requires at least some minimal thinking to figure out
what the address is and to send the right targeted message.

At the same time, we should acknowledge that there are some things these
other products do well. TCP proxy/loadbalancing seems to be present in
many proxies but not httpd. Most products do not expose users to
underlying implementation details and instead allow the administrator to
express what they want done (the example that comes to mind is
slotmem/proxy modules needing to be loaded or a semi-confusing error
will come up). Some have really great 'how to' pages on their main docs
site to keep people from needing to dig.

>   2. They don't seem to have issues in understanding that new features,
>  enhancements and improvements to the server is what keeps users
>  and grows community. Instead, we either spend our time naval
>  gazing and pondering such inane issues as revisiting versioning,
>  or else treat the codebase like a school exercise where the
>  winner is the one who changes the most number of lines. Each time
>  a new feature is proposed, we have to deal with the incessant
>  blather around 2.6, 3.0, EOLing 2.4, blah blah blah. We've had
>  some features in httpd long before similar functionality existed
>  in nginx, for example, but they got to release 1st because we
>  were too busy standing on soapboxes or bike-shedding.

I think it's fair to point out that we have shipped regressions in some
form or another for several of our recent releases... plus a few that
didn't get shipped thanks to the n00b RM :-). I can't speak for every
contributor to the code base, but I view breaking or significantly
altering a configuration that is working today to be criminal.

Given that we have made mistakes, the conversations that are being held
are both an acknowledgement of the errors and brainstorming about how we
can proceed without harming our users. We want to release new features
AND remain stable AND improve the code base. There is a balancing act
among those three goals we need to agree on as a community.



I'll use this blank line as a quote for what I think could possibly be a
third point for consideration. We are lacking in two areas that I think
are key for survivability: enterprise usability and machine-based management
On the enterprise front: one of the things that Microsoft gets right is
that with enough clicking around in a UI, an administrator can
accidentally implement a perfectly functional server. The massive
amounts of study put toward usability and consistency pays off since an
admin who understands how to generally set up a windows server could
just kinda figure out how to start and manage the web subsystem. Talking
about nginx in the enterprise, you don't get that same level of
"clickability"... but you DO get a phone number you can call and
complain to when your config isn't working right as well as some
pre-sales/post-sales engineers that will help you through the
configuration syntax.

On the exact opposite front: IIS and nginx suffer just as badly as we do
when it comes to machine-driven management. There are pretty clear
trends happening in the world around aggregating several OSS projects
into a larger amalgamation (Kubernetes being a rather fine example).
These amalgamations tend to prefer services which can be configured by a
machine both pre and post start. In the proxy space, envoy is a big
up-and-comer where config can be read from file but completely altered
via API after the server has started. Having a machine-friendly
configuration syntax (YML or JSON, for example) would be a great gateway
to constructing a generic API handler that can modify nearly any part of
the running server.

To be fair... I think these are cool things to do, but FAR beyond my
skill set and time budget.



> Personally, I'd like to see the the PMC take a more active and
> direct role in addressing #1, maybe w/ monthly blog posts
> coordinated w/ Sally. It would also be cool to reboot Apache Week
> (I know it was an external, 3rd party effort) in in conjunction
> w/ the blog posts or instead of it.

This is interesting. Can you provide some examples for the types of blog
posts that you think would be good to make? Stealing from other parts of
the thread (thanks, Luca!), I could see value in providing bite-sized
tidbits of how requests/responses are run, what this whole "hook" and
"pool" 

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Greg Stein]

Just. Stop.

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 5:29 PM, Jim Jagielski  wrote:

>
>
> > On Apr 18, 2018, at 2:32 PM, William A Rowe Jr 
> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 1:07 PM, Jim Jagielski  wrote:
> >>
> >>> On Apr 18, 2018, at 1:21 PM, William A Rowe Jr 
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> There we go again. Why do you and Graham have to make this about
> >>> Bill vs. yourselves?
> >>
> >> I didn't.
> >
> > It's a challenge to read this otherwise;
> >
>
> I used the term "we" consistently. If, for some reason, you see
> things in what I say that you think may align w/ behaviors that
> you attribute to yourself, that is you putting that on, not me.
>
>

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Jim Jagielski]

> On Apr 18, 2018, at 2:32 PM, William A Rowe Jr  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 1:07 PM, Jim Jagielski  wrote:
>> 
>>> On Apr 18, 2018, at 1:21 PM, William A Rowe Jr  wrote:
>>> 
>>> There we go again. Why do you and Graham have to make this about
>>> Bill vs. yourselves?
>> 
>> I didn't.
> 
> It's a challenge to read this otherwise;
> 

I used the term "we" consistently. If, for some reason, you see
things in what I say that you think may align w/ behaviors that
you attribute to yourself, that is you putting that on, not me.

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Marion et Christophe JAILLET]

Le 18/04/2018 à 21:00, Luca Toscano a écrit :


Before joining the httpd project as contributor I struggled to find 
good technical sources about how the httpd internals work, especially 
when it comes to important bits like mpm-event and how its 
architecture can be compared with other products. One of my first 
tasks was to improve the mpm-event's documentation page, and it took 
me a ton of time to understand a very high level overview of it (plus 
a lot of people patiently tried to explain to me how things were 
working). Without good "authoritative" references a lot of people can 
write whatever they want on httpd, because there are too few people 
that can scan the web and discuss inaccuracies (https://xkcd.com/386).


I keep struggling with internals in these days, even if I check 
httpd's code daily, so I can't imagine somebody not involved in the 
project that tries to make a comparison between httpd and product X, 
when the latter has a ton of good explanation about how it works in 
detail (most of the times with a lot of really explicative graphics 
attached).


My point is: blogging is fine, but before even starting that I'd focus 
on dumping everybody's knowledge in sections of the docs like 
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer 
. It is boring and less 
fun than writing C code for sure, but I bet that a ton of people would 
enjoy details about how things work. It will be easier for people to 
spot "liars" in the web that focus their marketing strategy only on 
how httpd is "old" and not performant too..



+1

There are some books around about these internals. Some can be 
downloaded in pdf.
I also from time to time give a look at 
http://www.fmc-modeling.org/category/projects/apache/amp/Apache_Modeling_Project.html 
which gives a nice overview, which I hope, is still correct.


CJ

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Mark Blackman]

> On 18 Apr 2018, at 17:29, William A Rowe Jr  wrote:
> 
> 
> Many will always carry a deep fondness or appreciation for Apache
> httpd; how much traffic it actually carries in future years is another
> question entirely, and has everything to do with the questions we
> should have solved some time ago, and aught to solve now. Better late
> than never.

Is most popular the right thing to aim for? I would advise continuing to trade 
on Apache’s current strengths (versatility and documentation for me and 
relative stability) and let the chips fall where they may. It’s an open source 
project with a massive first-mover advantage and no investors to please. Just 
do the right thing, stay visible and the rest will sort itself out.

Corporates are pretty wedded to Apache due to 3rd party module support.

- Mark

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Luca Toscano]

My 2c!

2018-04-18 19:21 GMT+02:00 William A Rowe Jr :

> On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 11:46 AM, Jim Jagielski  wrote:
> > IMO, this boils down to 2 things:
> >
> >   1. nginx, particularly, does a LOT of promoting, marketing, PR, etc...
> >  We don't. They get to promote their FUD all the time and remain
> >  pretty much unchallenged.
>
> Launched a thread on one aspect we don't have right, and not limited
> to nginx. Another aspect we probably won't solve-for is the tendency
> for new server/proxy solutions to be linux-only, or linux/windows. So
> long as we can abstract it, we don't have any reason to jettison other
> active platform communities which offer enough features.
>
> > Personally, I'd like to see the the PMC take a more active and
> > direct role in addressing #1, maybe w/ monthly blog posts
> > coordinated w/ Sally. It would also be cool to reboot Apache Week
> > (I know it was an external, 3rd party effort) in in conjunction
> > w/ the blog posts or instead of it.
>
> That's a great idea! But the readers are almost exclusively httpd's
> adopters, rarely those who are adopters of other technology.
> Would it help retention of existing admins? Sure, somewhat.
>

Before joining the httpd project as contributor I struggled to find good
technical sources about how the httpd internals work, especially when it
comes to important bits like mpm-event and how its architecture can be
compared with other products. One of my first tasks was to improve the
mpm-event's documentation page, and it took me a ton of time to understand
a very high level overview of it (plus a lot of people patiently tried to
explain to me how things were working). Without good "authoritative"
references a lot of people can write whatever they want on httpd, because
there are too few people that can scan the web and discuss inaccuracies (
https://xkcd.com/386).

I keep struggling with internals in these days, even if I check httpd's
code daily, so I can't imagine somebody not involved in the project that
tries to make a comparison between httpd and product X, when the latter has
a ton of good explanation about how it works in detail (most of the times
with a lot of really explicative graphics attached).

My point is: blogging is fine, but before even starting that I'd focus on
dumping everybody's knowledge in sections of the docs like
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/developer. It is boring and less fun
than writing C code for sure, but I bet that a ton of people would enjoy
details about how things work. It will be easier for people to spot "liars"
in the web that focus their marketing strategy only on how httpd is "old"
and not performant too..


> Until we shake this notion of "2.6/3.0 considered harmful", the httpd
> project is effectively concluded/no more than a couple tinkerers'
> patch collection.
>

Don't really want to comment on other subjects but only pointing that the
statement, in my opinion, is not true. I saw a lot of people recently
pushing for 2.6, and I believe that everybody's agree that it needs to be
done. We are still trying to find a balance between eagerness of improve
how 2.4 works and its limits, but I am pretty sure we'll find a way soon.

Luca

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[William A Rowe Jr]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 1:07 PM, Jim Jagielski  wrote:
>
>> On Apr 18, 2018, at 1:21 PM, William A Rowe Jr  wrote:
>>
>> There we go again. Why do you and Graham have to make this about
>> Bill vs. yourselves?
>
> I didn't.

It's a challenge to read this otherwise;

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 11:46 AM, Jim Jagielski  wrote:
>
>   2. [...] Instead, we either spend our time naval
>  gazing and pondering such inane issues as revisiting versioning,

You would be hard pressed to suggest you are calling anyone else's
concerns inane, and demonstrate resentment in your email tone on
every thread I present offering different ways to do things, other than
continuing as-is and on the same glide path of httpd into irrelevancy.


On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 11:17 AM, Graham Leggett  wrote:
>
> You seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill [...]


Both statements attack not the technical question, but the questioner.
Please mind your framing.

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Jim Jagielski]

> On Apr 18, 2018, at 1:21 PM, William A Rowe Jr  wrote:
> 
> 
> There we go again. Why do you and Graham have to make this about
> Bill vs. yourselves?

I didn't.

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[William A Rowe Jr]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 11:46 AM, Jim Jagielski  wrote:
> IMO, this boils down to 2 things:
>
>   1. nginx, particularly, does a LOT of promoting, marketing, PR, etc...
>  We don't. They get to promote their FUD all the time and remain
>  pretty much unchallenged.

Launched a thread on one aspect we don't have right, and not limited
to nginx. Another aspect we probably won't solve-for is the tendency
for new server/proxy solutions to be linux-only, or linux/windows. So
long as we can abstract it, we don't have any reason to jettison other
active platform communities which offer enough features.

> Personally, I'd like to see the the PMC take a more active and
> direct role in addressing #1, maybe w/ monthly blog posts
> coordinated w/ Sally. It would also be cool to reboot Apache Week
> (I know it was an external, 3rd party effort) in in conjunction
> w/ the blog posts or instead of it.

That's a great idea! But the readers are almost exclusively httpd's
adopters, rarely those who are adopters of other technology.
Would it help retention of existing admins? Sure, somewhat.

>   2. They don't seem to have issues in understanding that new features,
>  enhancements and improvements to the server is what keeps users
>  and grows community. Instead, we either spend our time naval
>  gazing and pondering such inane issues as revisiting versioning,
>  or else treat the codebase like a school exercise where the
>  winner is the one who changes the most number of lines. Each time
>  a new feature is proposed, we have to deal with the incessant
>  blather around 2.6, 3.0, EOLing 2.4, blah blah blah. We've had
>  some features in httpd long before similar functionality existed
>  in nginx, for example, but they got to release 1st because we
>  were too busy standing on soapboxes or bike-shedding.

There we go again. Why do you and Graham have to make this about
Bill vs. yourselves? It isn't. What I've presented is data, and real world
observations, conclusions and assumptions by myself and OH from
other engineers and users. When your argument boils down to "but I
don't see it that way" you've already lost the technical argument. Not
that one or the other conclusion is more correct, but that you reject
considering valid any perspective other than your own.

New features have been bogged down because they keep introducing
breaking changes to 2.4.x behavior. Then there is a big loop-de-loop
of fitting square pegs into the round holes, and finally we have some
"compatible" Frankenstein monster of a work-around. Using the word
compatible very loosely here. How fast would mod_http2 happened
had no crazy glue been required to fit metric bolts into english nuts?
Or the ssl/md refactoring? These are things that open source projects
demand to have clear revisioning.

Because of this intractable position against ever shipping another
version major.minor of httpd, this false narrative that no administrator
or distributor would ever pick up the .next good version, that "every"
contributor's time is a waste if they can't have their enhancement
in the next bug fix release "right now!"; there's no incentive to do any
of the hard work of solving the .last version's structural deficiencies,
or to implement any of the enhancements in a legible and robust
way without legacy headaches and workarounds, leaving httpd on
a glide-path to eventual abandonment.

In other words, your observation 2. above is a total red herring,
no patches were blocked significantly longer than people took
to work out the kinks, discussions of versioning never actually
delayed the introduction of features (there were parallel threads,
but only typical technical objections)... and proves again that you
seek to stall this project, after promises to the contrary.

Until we shake this notion of "2.6/3.0 considered harmful", the httpd
project is effectively concluded/no more than a couple tinkerers'
patch collection.

> And finally, when the vast majority of web servers nowadays live
> *behind* proxy servers, these type of metric surveys are meaningless.
> Of course, I feel that this was nginx and MS' plan all along: they
> knew how things were changing and wanted to win the "proxy server
> market"... all that should be pretty obvious w/ 20/20 hindsight.

The actual heavy lift isn't even httpd proxy_balancer/nginx/IIS...
the real work is being done by the transparent gateway/proxies,
something we don't even speak (and is realistically beyond our charter.)

Re: "Most Popular Web Server?"

[Jim Jagielski]

IMO, this boils down to 2 things:

  1. nginx, particularly, does a LOT of promoting, marketing, PR, etc...
 We don't. They get to promote their FUD all the time and remain
 pretty much unchallenged.

  2. They don't seem to have issues in understanding that new features,
 enhancements and improvements to the server is what keeps users
 and grows community. Instead, we either spend our time naval
 gazing and pondering such inane issues as revisiting versioning,
 or else treat the codebase like a school exercise where the
 winner is the one who changes the most number of lines. Each time
 a new feature is proposed, we have to deal with the incessant
 blather around 2.6, 3.0, EOLing 2.4, blah blah blah. We've had
 some features in httpd long before similar functionality existed
 in nginx, for example, but they got to release 1st because we
 were too busy standing on soapboxes or bike-shedding.

Personally, I'd like to see the the PMC take a more active and
direct role in addressing #1, maybe w/ monthly blog posts
coordinated w/ Sally. It would also be cool to reboot Apache Week
(I know it was an external, 3rd party effort) in in conjunction
w/ the blog posts or instead of it.

And finally, when the vast majority of web servers nowadays live
*behind* proxy servers, these type of metric surveys are meaningless.
Of course, I feel that this was nginx and MS' plan all along: they
knew how things were changing and wanted to win the "proxy server
market"... all that should be pretty obvious w/ 20/20 hindsight.

> On Apr 18, 2018, at 12:29 PM, William A Rowe Jr <wr...@rowe-clan.net> wrote:
> 
> "Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Apache Software Foundation
> oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache
> HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software."
> 
> How long will that last claim remain true?
> 
> We can sum up the state of affairs from four well-respected web server
> popularity reports from three sources;
> 
> https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/03/27/march-2018-web-server-survey.html
> (Based on 214M hostnames / 7M IP's)
> 
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/201803/index.html
> (Based on 63M hostnames)
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201803/httpbyip.html
> (Based on 5M IP's)
> 
> https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all
> (Based on Alexa-ranked top ~10M primary domains)
> 
> Notably, we now hold the minority-majority position across the "web
> server" space, discounting the fact that "unknown/other" would
> probably still land us at 50% using really simple stats, for some few
> more months. Still, there is an unarguable downward trend of adoption
> and relevance of Apache httpd.
> 
> Depending on which survey you examine, either IIS or ngnix has caught
> up rapidly; the disagreement between surveys is often laughable. While
> IP's themselves might make for a better mapping, these are equally
> 'virtual' and don't represent machines either. Mass hosting, by name
> or number, is easily observed in these reports with huge swings from
> month to month. Reports which don't feature as much swing have
> apparently factored out much of the duplicated noise/domain camping.
> 
> As as been restated over and over, http:// is effectively DOA, long
> live https:// (h2, etc). Brings us to the point that we have not been
> the most popular HTTP/TLS server for over two years, and you can
> surmise what this will do over time to the numbers offered above;
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/sdata/201803/index.html
> https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/sdata/201803/servers.html
> 
> Many will always carry a deep fondness or appreciation for Apache
> httpd; how much traffic it actually carries in future years is another
> question entirely, and has everything to do with the questions we
> should have solved some time ago, and aught to solve now. Better late
> than never.

"Most Popular Web Server?"

[William A Rowe Jr]

"Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Apache Software Foundation
oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache
HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software."

How long will that last claim remain true?

We can sum up the state of affairs from four well-respected web server
popularity reports from three sources;

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/03/27/march-2018-web-server-survey.html
(Based on 214M hostnames / 7M IP's)

https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/201803/index.html
(Based on 63M hostnames)
https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201803/httpbyip.html
(Based on 5M IP's)

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/web_server/all
(Based on Alexa-ranked top ~10M primary domains)

Notably, we now hold the minority-majority position across the "web
server" space, discounting the fact that "unknown/other" would
probably still land us at 50% using really simple stats, for some few
more months. Still, there is an unarguable downward trend of adoption
and relevance of Apache httpd.

Depending on which survey you examine, either IIS or ngnix has caught
up rapidly; the disagreement between surveys is often laughable. While
IP's themselves might make for a better mapping, these are equally
'virtual' and don't represent machines either. Mass hosting, by name
or number, is easily observed in these reports with huge swings from
month to month. Reports which don't feature as much swing have
apparently factored out much of the duplicated noise/domain camping.

As as been restated over and over, http:// is effectively DOA, long
live https:// (h2, etc). Brings us to the point that we have not been
the most popular HTTP/TLS server for over two years, and you can
surmise what this will do over time to the numbers offered above;
https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/sdata/201803/index.html
https://secure1.securityspace.com/s_survey/sdata/201803/servers.html

Many will always carry a deep fondness or appreciation for Apache
httpd; how much traffic it actually carries in future years is another
question entirely, and has everything to do with the questions we
should have solved some time ago, and aught to solve now. Better late
than never.