Hi Apologies in advance for the length of this email, please bear with me :)
First an introduction: I'm senior manager of R&D for a group of ISPs including register.it, names.co.uk, nominalia.es, amen.fr, register365.com, and simplyhosting.com. As a group, we host over 1.6 million domains and 600,000 web sites. Currently, we have 3 shared hosting clusters in Italy, the UK and Ireland. The Italian platform is based on Apache and the UK and Irish platforms are based on Zeus Web Server. We also have a legacy platform, inherited from a recent acquisition, based on Apache and H-Sphere, which we are currently migrating to Zeus. Until recently, we have been very happy with our choice of Zeus Web Server. We have gained a solid reputation in the UK for having a very high-performing and reliable platform, and we have won the UK ISP Award (ISPA) for Best Shared Hosting for the last 3 years running. However, we are now considering migrating away from ZWS for the following reasons: 1) It hasn't been updated since 2007, and Zeus will not commit to any future updates other than security patches. 2) It makes commercial sense for us to use the same technology everywhere in the group. 3) Zeus does not support mod_rewrite. Given these requirements, and the fact we are already using it in Italy, the obvious solution would be to use Apache on all platforms. However, I am seriously concerned that the performance would suffer as a result, so I'm currently studying the feasibility of other options. The need for mod_rewrite is a practical, commercial requirement based on the fact that many 3rd-party applications require rewrite rules, and the vast majority only work with mod_rewrite without the intervention of a developer. This has always been something of issue for us, and the growing popularity of open source software among non-developers is greatly exacerbating the problem. Also, we now provide Softaculous for our customers, but we've had to disable many of the 150+ applications because of their reliance on mod_rewrite. Furthermore, when we started migrating the H-Sphere platform, we found an unusually high proportion of domains are using mod_rewrite. During previous migrations, we have replaced them with Zeus rewrite scripts, but this time the numbers are just too high. So, we recently employed an experienced C developer to write an ISAPI filter to replicate exactly the behaviour of mod_rewrite under Zeus. However, although this works perfectly in our development environment (even under extremely heavy loads), after a few days on the live platform, something goes very wrong. After several weeks of debugging, testing and reading memory dumps, we're convinced the problem is with Zeus's ISAPI implementation - but so far we are unable to prove it, and I'm not sure they would fix it even if we could! If you are interested, I am confident I could arrange for the source code of our ISAPI Rewrite module to be released to the Cherokee project for use as an optional module. Obviously, the ISAPI layer would need to be replaced, but this is a minor part of the code. All we ask in return is that someone adds support for the other, mostly very simple, htaccess directives. I can ask the original developer if he would be willing to contribute to this, but he doesn't work for me so I can't guarantee it. Without this functionality, the only other option available to us is LiteSpeed - but I'm not keen on adopting another closed-source solution that isn't gaining significant market share. Also, I am convinced this is the only major hurdle preventing other mass hosting providers from moving away from Apache to something that scales more efficiently, such as Cherokee. Lastly, I have another feature suggestion to address the needs of mass hosting - support for custom document root mapping functions. Currently, we use the same method as shown in the documentation - ie /sites/e/x/example.com. This is fine for a few 10s of thousands of sites, but not very efficient once you get beyond 100,000. A better solution is what we use on our email clusters, which have many more users (around 1,000,000 in Italy). This uses the last 3 characters of the MD5 checksum of the username, like this: /email/5ab/example.com. This produces a more even distribution and, by being wide and shallow, allows for a much more efficient stat cache. Regards Marcus -- Marcus Don Senior Manager Research and Development DadaPro Main Line: +44 (0)845 363 3630 Main Fax: +44 (0)845 363 3631 Tech Support: +44 (0)845 363 3634 Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.names.co.uk Address: Acton House, Perdiswell Park, Worcester WR3 7GD This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender immediately. If you are not the intended recipient you are notified that disclosing, copying, distributing or taking any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. Please note that any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the company. Finally, the recipient should check this email and any attachments for the presence of viruses. The company accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this email. _______________________________________________ Cherokee mailing list [email protected] http://lists.octality.com/listinfo/cherokee
