To: new-httpd@apache.org
From: Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>
Subject: Re: Proposal: new config API
In-Reply-To: <19990611170030.A28017@dosa.raleigh.ibm.com>
Message-Id: <E10scZv-0001dQ-00@fanf.noc.demon.net>
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 02:27:23 +0100
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Manoj Kasichainula <manojk@raleigh.ibm.com> wrote:
>An idea I've been bouncing around in my head for a day or two which is
>definitely not completely thought out yet. The two goals are to
>further modularize the configuration system, and to allow dynamic
>configuration, e.g. through a named pipe, LDAP, or SNMP.

I've been thinking about this recently from the slightly more
specialized perspective of mass vhosting. (But I'm not completely
obsessed with it, OK?) At the moment most of these schemes rely on the
filesystem to translate between vhosts and home directories, which may
be trivial but isn't on any of our systems and anyway people change
their domain names. Doing the translation of request to document root
in one stage via LDAP is attractive because it allows us to couple
provisioning to the central configuration database more closely, but
it also has the potential to make performance completely suck because
of the degree of extra complexity that has been added to handling a
request.

I think my question is, How do you balance dynamic configuration
between once-at-startup and per-request?

Maybe this is where decoupling the targets of requests from the
filesystem and layered IO comes into play.

Tony.
-- 
f.a.n.finch   dot@dotat.at   fanf@demon.net
Winner, International Obfuscated C Code Competition 1998