Apache Week issue 298

                                APACHE WEEK
                                      
The essential weekly guide for users of the world's most popular Web server.
                         Issue 298: 14th June 2002
                                      
                                 In this issue
                                       
     * Under development
     * Featured articles
       
                               Under development
                                       
     Tarballs were created this week for a 2.0.37 release, but at the
     last minute a problem in the handling of HEAD requests was
     discovered, causing the server to hang rather than sending the
     response (on some operating systems). A fix was quickly committed,
     and the 2.0.37 release was abandoned; testing is now underway for a
     2.0.38 release.
     
     Discussion continued from last week on PHP performance issues in
     Apache 2.0, a major concern being the buffering of script output.
     In 1.3, the output of a PHP script was buffered internally by
     Apache before being sent to the client, meaning that a smaller
     number of system calls were used to send the data. Currently in 2.0
     the PHP filter module uses the non-buffering interface to the
     filter stack, resulting in a large number of system calls each
     writing small amounts of data. A workaround for this problem is to
     enable PHP's internal buffering setting the output_buffering
     configuration variable; a proposal was made to change the PHP
     filter to use the buffered write interface by default.
     
                               Featured articles
                                       
     In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that
     are of interest to Apache users.
     
     Developer Shed explores a significant facet of the Apache web
     server in [1]"Using Apache As A Proxy Server". It kicks off by
     explaining about the functions of a proxy server, and then provides
     the instructions for compiling, installing, and configuring both
     Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0 as a proxy server and also as a reverse
     proxy server. It also shows you how to enable the proxy caching
     feature.
     
     In [2]"Parsing and Summarizing a Logfile", Randal L. Schwartz walks
     you through a tool which he wrote using Perl, for analysing how
     many hits are being cached and delivered by a stripped-down Apache
     server which acts as a caching reverse proxy server. For this to
     work, the access log file need to store caching information. This
     is implemented by using the CustomLog and LogFormat directives.
     
     This article looks at another [3]custom caching solution which is
     used to scale a dynamic content management system. It uses
     ColdFusion Web Application Server 5.0, and Apache as the Web server
     on Windows 2000 to illustrate its points but the underlying
     technique could be applied to any platform and software.
     
     [4]Chapter 4 ("Performance Monitoring") of the book, "Web
     Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition" by Patrick Killelea defines the
     parameters of performance and shows you a few methods on measuring
     and monitoring it. Apache is used in the example for setting up a
     version of ps that can be accessed from the Web.
       ______________________________________________________________
     
     This issue brought to you by: Joe Orton, Min Min Tsan
     Comments or criticisms? Please email us at
     [5][email protected].
     
     [6]Apache Week is copyright 1996-2002 by [7]Red Hat, Inc.

References

   1. http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/Administration/ApacheProxy/page1.html
   2. http://www.samag.com/documents/s=7237/sam0207j/0207j.htm
   3. http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/26/index4a.html
   4. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webpt2/chapter/ch04.html
   5. mailto:[email protected]
   6. http://www.apacheweek.com/
   7. http://www.redhat.com/

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