From: Chuck Murcko <chuck@telebase.com>
Message-Id: <199507251905.PAA24599@telebase.com.>
Subject: Re: Redirect in .htaccess files?
To: new-httpd@hyperreal.com
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 1995 15:05:29 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <9507251817.AA19715@volterra> from "Robert S. Thau" at Jul 25,
 95 02:17:32 pm
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 1868      
Sender: owner-new-httpd@apache.org
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: new-httpd@apache.org

Robert S. Thau liltingly intones:
> 
> [ discussion of server dieoff and why I picked an insanely low
>   hard limit ]
> 
> However, I am somewhat loath to let people set AbsMaxServers (or
> whatever) to 7 and think they've done themselves a favor.  As it is,
> they've still got the source code, and they can screw themselves if
> they really want to, but we haven't made it easy for them.
> 
I agree, actually. I hadn't taken the time to think about the sizes of real
requests for that example. I also think that the absolute max is probably
not a good thing for casual tweaking, and putting it in the source is a way
to make it harder to config up a dead dawg. Folks with heavy hardware and
traffic should be able to bump it up. (Our machine here starts with 50
children, and actually does rise some from there to a stable level,
typically 65-70). The nature of sent data has a lot of say in the way the
server's configured, though, so the word's still caveat configurator.
And even the best httpd config loses when the underlying machine config
is not up to the job.

My first stress tests, for instance, only used 11 or so servers because
they were sending many small data items. I never got close to my listen
backlog for that reason. It took more clients requesting larger chunks of
data to do that, and the config profile became radically different, both
for httpd and the OS. It seems a real quality rating for an httpd is not
just how many hits a day it takes, but also how big the transactions are,
and what kind of transaction mix is involved.

BTW, BSDI and Solaris both seem stable under load at this time.

chuck
Chuck Murcko	Telebase Systems, Inc.	Wayne PA	chuck@telebase.com
And now, on a lighter note:
Aphorism, n.:
	A concise, clever statement.
Afterism, n.:
	A concise, clever statement you don't think of until too late.
		-- James Alexander Thom