On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 2:00 AM, William A Rowe Jr <[email protected]> wrote:
> According to securityspace's October-November delta, nearly half a million > web hosts jumped to httpd 2.2.31 in the past month alone (almost entirely > from older 2.2.x servers) while 11k downgraded to an older 2.2 or upgraded > 2.2.31 to 2.4.x. > > Half a million in 31 days? This is triple the 2.2.31 adoption from the > Sept time-frame. > > > http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.201510/srvch.html?server=Apache&revision=Apache%2F2.2.31 > > The httpd 2.4.12 - 2.4.17 series experienced about 142k upgrades vs. 16k > downgrades over the same period, and similar numbers in Sept-Oct. Those > releases are essentially concurrent with the 2.2.31 release, and I didn't > look back into 2014's releases on either branch since 2.2.29 and 2.4.10 are > both over a year old. > This might be easier to follow as a graphic, here is the overall adoption of 2.2.29 and .31, along with 2.4.10 and later; http://s.apache.org/FXM Consider that this all ignores the users who latch onto their OS distributor - who had 'locked' on 2.2 and 2.4 releases long ago, and whose users are only going to pick up a new httpd when their distributor ships it. What I believe we are looking at is honest-to-goodness sysadmins who push out "their own choice" of httpd onto their machines. > On the one hand, I'm ecstatic that users are clearly upgrading at maybe > the fastest pace in forever. On the other hand, I am stuck wondering how > we have made the 2.4.x transition effectively 3x harder than upgrading > within the 2.2 lineage, and puzzling over what we can improve as a project > to ease this transition for millions of deployed 2.2.x instances. > And before the inevitable laments begin that we chose to ship a 2.2.31 release... Same time period, 201,907 sites adopted nginx in lieu of Apache, while 90,997 left nginx for Apache, with a net deficit of 111k sites moving to 'something else'. If it is that easy to move 202k sites (111k net) to an entirely different server, it is supposed to be much simpler for the users to move within the same server - from their 2.2.x to 2.4.current, isn't it? And if it is that easy to move away, then for 2.2 to 2.4 migration to continue to be painful will surely hurt httpd adoption, down the road.
