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Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:58:11 -0500
From: Joshua Slive <joshua@slive.ca>
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Subject: Re: OT: performance FUD
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Paul A Houle wrote:
> 
>    Don't make it a "fudbusting" site,  make it a "apache performance 
> tuning" site.
> 
>    There are all of these statements in the apache docs that
> 
> * .htaccess is slow
> * ExtendedStatus on reduces performance
> 
>    We did a round of performance testing on a server that we 
> commissioned last year and took measurements of these things,  and found 
> that we'd need to put >1000 rewriting rules to harm performance 
> noticably,  that the overhead of ExtendedStatus On is negligible for a 
> site that gets 500 hits/sec,  etc.
> 
>    I might see if I can find my report about this on this and put it 
> online -- there some things that I know,  and even more that I don't...
> 
> * prefork and worker seem to be about equally fast on linux?
> * is the case on Solaris?
> * MacOS X?
> * Solaris 9 is embarassingly slow running Apache compared to Linux -- is 
> the same the case with Solaris 10?

Suggestions to improve
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.1/misc/perf-tuning.html
are very welcome.  Suggestions backed by data are even better.

One issue is that this page was written for (and, in fact, by) the Dean 
Gaudet-type performance freak who was looking to squeeze every last 
ounce of performance when serving static pages.  All you need to do is 
add one CGI script or php app to your site and everything on that page 
after the hardware section gets lost in the noise.  So when people mail 
users@httpd asking how to fix performance problems, the answer is almost 
always "fix your database" or "rewrite your web app" and not "change 
your apache configuration" or "get a faster web server".

That is why just communicating the fact that apache is "fast enough" in 
almost all cases is important.

Joshua.