Brian Akins wrote:
This is probably way off topic for this list. I was searching for
something related to php this morning (I know, I know... But some
people here need php) and the majority of the google hits where FUD
sites. Most of them generally say "Apache is bloated and slow, you
should use X." I know we have several people on this list who run
Apache on very high traffic sites. While we cannot answer every
single piece of FUD out there, do we need a general page to answer
some of them. Maybe "testimonials" or something. I know, with my
config, I can easily saturate multiple gig interfaces and have a
rather full feature installation.
Apache isn't the fastest web server -- at least without mod_event.
I've seen data corruption with all of the free single-process web
servers, although I'd assume that products like Zeus do better.
Looking at Alexa, the logs from a few sites I run, and
benchmarking I've done, there are probably only a few thousand web
sites in the world that push the limits of a single Apache web server.
Perhaps 100x as many PHB's ~might~ pick a web server because of numbers
in a glossy ad. The real competition is with IIS, and people don't
choose Apache or IIS based on performance numbers -- they choose it
because they are familiar with Unix or familiar with Windows. Other web
servers are at the 1% market share level:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/11/07/november_2005_web_server_survey.html
----
Don't make it a "fudbusting" site, make it a "apache performance
tuning" site.
There are all of these statements in the apache docs that
* .htaccess is slow
* ExtendedStatus on reduces performance
We did a round of performance testing on a server that we
commissioned last year and took measurements of these things, and found
that we'd need to put >1000 rewriting rules to harm performance
noticably, that the overhead of ExtendedStatus On is negligible for a
site that gets 500 hits/sec, etc.
I might see if I can find my report about this on this and put it
online -- there some things that I know, and even more that I don't...
* prefork and worker seem to be about equally fast on linux?
* is the case on Solaris?
* MacOS X?
* Solaris 9 is embarassingly slow running Apache compared to Linux -- is
the same the case with Solaris 10?
