William A. Rowe Jr. wrote: >> - Supporting prefork as httpd does now; and > > I'm very happy to see prefork die it's timely death. > > Let's go about working out where out-of-process magic happens. > Gated, single threaded handlers may be sensible in some cases. > But for the core server it makes async worthless, and supporting > both digs us deeper into the bad-old-days of the 1.3 codebase.
I disagree strongly, for a number of reasons. The first is that in our experience of a very high traffic collection of websites, the more "hops" you have, the more performance starts to suck, with the added complication that you run the risk of bumping your head into the ceiling of filehandle limits, and other issues. If you move from "httpd-prefork" to "httpd-something proxied to random-appserver-X-doing-prefork-for-you" you aren't removing prefork - you just moving it somewhere else and adding an extra hop. You're also making it more complicated, and more complicated means less reliable. People like to harp on about how they want "speed speed speed". Right up to the point where it first starts becoming unreliable. At that point they suddenly start crying "reliable reliable reliable". Apache httpd does lots of things right. We must resist the temptation to throw out what we do right, while we try move forward fixing what we do wrong. Regards, Graham --
