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Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:28:25 -0500
From: "William A. Rowe, Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net>
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To: dev@httpd.apache.org
Subject: Re: [community] 2.3.0 alpha on October 1?
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Bing Swen wrote:
> 
> Although Apache is famous for its modular design and configuration 
> flexibility, it seems
> these new comers are challenging the relevance of Apache in real use. Is 
> there any
> chance for Apache to get much better performance while retaining its design 
> beauty?

No, and yes.

No, there's very little chance that anyone will randomly attack the poor
perfomance before 2.3.0 alpha, and the rule of open source software is that
the one with an itch to scratch is the one who will author and offer the
patch.  Maybe that's you :)

And yes, httpd quite possibly approaches their performance if you drop off
3/4 of all of the default modules.  Especially if it's tuned to use the
event mpm and sendfile.

And finally, yes; httpd 2.4/3.0 is likely to offer (not "always" use, some
modules will be foreever incompatible) a truly async mode of operation.
That is, with the current enhanced poll semantics (about 5 different flavors
across 4 major OS's) there's no reason not to park workers with "nothing to
do right now" away from any worker thread.

But I'd challenge you to configure nothing but the bare minimum modules
which solve your configuration and *then* post some notes about performance.
If you are comparing an "everything plus the kitchen sink" default Apache
httpd to a far more featureless server, there's really nothing we can tell
you other than the features suck CPU.

Bill