Couldn't agree more. The bottleneck on any web server *should* be the 
connection speed to the internet. With my ADSL connection, I'm throttled to 
768Kbit ( yeah right! ) bandwidth - say 10Kbyte/sec. Most serial ports can 
comfortably deliver that, but it's more than enough to demonstrate demo 
software to prospective clients ( and I'm running apache as a vmware client, 
along with a mail server in another, and clustered oracle database servers in 2 
more on that server! ) . Even my production sites are only delivering at about 
2Mbit peak - 200 - 250 KByte/sec is still nothing with ( the system bottleneck 
of ) disks capable of 100 to 200 times that performance, even though the 
server's a couple of years old now.

<rant>
The problem then comes when massive aplications are wheeled in to deliver 
dynamic content for those sites, requiring databases hundreds of MB in size, 
vast quantities of interpreted code ( well yes, OO PHP is much prettier, but 
it's been proved to be 4 times *slower* than the equivalent procedural code ), 
and so on. I see terrible performance hits again where these 'state of the art' 
CMS's ( rarely implemented to support the community audience they were 
originally intended for ) are wheeled in: why's the supporting database so 
huge? -  why are they logging all this stuff to the database - we've got system 
logs, webserver logs, we're using google analytics for free, so why must we 
have *yet another* level of logging? Why can't developers just develop and 
deliver reliable, tested code instead of trying to fix life, the universe, and 
the kitchen sink as well! 
</rant>

Time for a valium... (:

Steve

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:49:55 +1300
Chris Hellyar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> In my experience it's not apache that is bloated, it's the things people
> tend to hang on the back of it.  Poorly designed database apps, nasty
> cgi's, ugly PHP code, lousy perl.  Huge flat structured mySQL databases.
> 
> If you want to use apache for _just_ and http daemon you can remove all
> the modules from it quickly, and get it running in about 48Mb of ram
> without swapping on a 486 class machine, and it'll run forever.
> 
> On a junker celeron with 256Mb of ram you can easily hang a LAMP setup
> that will serve 40-50k hits an hour without breaking a sweat as long as
> your php app is well written.
> 
> And lets face it, unless you're a masochist there's no reason for trying
> to host a public website on a really low spec machine these days, even
> gear a few years old now is more than enough to swing a box onto the web
> for a reasonably complex app.  (Without a gui that is!)
> 
> Yes it's a challenge to get a website online using thttpd on a hacked
> garage door opener, and I'm guilty of trying those things as well, but
> I'd never accuse Apache of being bloated because it wouldn't run on my
> TV remote!
> 
> Just my 2c, as always.. :-)
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 09:04 +1300, Jim Cheetham wrote:
> > On Dec 12, 2007 7:28 AM, Chris Hellyar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > What did apache do to annoy everyone?  Or are we severly skimping on
> > > hardware spec?
> > 
> > Apache is annoying in the same way that BIND is annoying -- it's a
> > general-purpose tool that shows bloat when being used for a small
> > single purpose task.
> 
> 


-- 
Steve Holdoway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Reply via email to