7 ms·

Can someone explain how this is different than how most people use Apache HTTPD these days? I'm not trying to be snarky -- I'm genuinely curious.

by exelius 11y ago

gruez 11y ago
> Can someone explain how this is different than how most people use Apache HTTPD these days You mean as a reverse proxy / cache server?. I don't have statistics but I would think that most people use apache as a regular http server (serving files or as part of a *AMP stack)
- exelius 11y ago
  People still use *AMP stacks? Edit: I was serious about that; I was under the impression that most stacks use much lighter weight http daemons than Apache these days. I understand that legacy apps are still out there and not everyone is going to refactor, but anyone developing web applications under Apache in 2016 is just a glutton for punishment...
  - mrweasel 11y ago
    I know a hosting company that exclusively deploy Apache, because that's what they know how to configure. Everything that works under nginx, will still work under Apache. If they need more performance, they put Apache behind a Riverbed Stringray/SteelApp/Brocade Trafic Manager (or whatever it's call these days). I think people are being to hard on Apache, it's still a great webserver for a ton of applications. That being said I prefer to configure Nginx over Apache.
    - tempestn 11y ago
      Also, if Apache is configured well, using the Event MPM (or even the older Worker) and sane thread counts for the server it's running on, it's a lot faster than it used to be. I can't say how fast compared to Nginx because literally every comparison between the two I've seen has hamstrung Apache by using the ancient Prefork MPM (and I haven't done a rigorous comparison myself), but I expect it's at least on the same order of magnitude.
      - rhizome 11y ago
        They're both plenty fast for most sites.
  - mindcrime 11y ago
    People still use _AMP stacks? Change this to "People still use X?" where the value of X is pretty much any technology you've ever heard of, dating back to the 1970's (if not before). And the answer will, to a first approximation, always be "yes". Now the number of people using X might be small, but you can all but bet your life that somebody, somewhere is, indeed, still using it. And depending on what it is, you might be surprised as how large the number actually is. Keep in mind, HN and Reddit, etc., comprise something of an echo chamber, where people of a certain mindset and orientation flock. The world is MUCH larger. No, RPG on iSeries /AS400 machines isn't "cool" and you won't see it mentioned on HN much (if at all) but this stuff is still used all over the place. LAMP stacks? Yeah, still widely used. OS/2? Not exactly "widely" used, but still used. COBOL? Yep. Fortran? Yep. MVS? Yep. And so on. Now, granted, this stuff isn't used by "hip startups" or "unicorns", but the world is a lot bigger than the SV startup scene. Technologies die VERY slowly for whatever reason, at least in regards to the "long tail" (so to speak) of the usage curve.
    - NeutronBoy 11y ago
      > Now, granted, this stuff isn't used by "hip startups" or "unicorns", but the world is a lot bigger than the SV startup scene. Most of it is used by business that literally manage your life. Banks, electrical and water, manufacturing plants, telephone exchanges, everything.
  - jamespo 11y ago
    It seems you're another person who hasn't used Apache since 1.3
pram 11y ago
this is closer to varnish or squid
therein 11y ago
Apache Traffic Server has support for native C++ plugins which allow you to make transformations to the headers and the body as the request and response passes through it. ATS's power comes mainly from these plugins, I would say, rather than just a reverse caching proxy. https://github.com/apache/trafficserver/tree/master/lib/atscppapi https://github.com/apache/trafficserver/tree/master/lib/atsc...
skuhn 11y ago
As others have indicated, it's a proxy server rather than a general purpose webserver. There's no code relation between the two servers; it's simply that the team at Yahoo chose to pursue it as an Apache Foundation project when they open sourced it. ATS scales orders of magnitude better than Apache, due to its process model. Whereas at Yahoo we would budget between 30-200 simultaneous connections per Apache server (prefork), the proxy service which I ran using ATS was budgeted for over 100,000 concurrent connections per machine. It's significantly less featureful than Apache, but it does caching substantially better than any other cache server commonly available (nginx, apache, squid, varnish).
- exelius 11y ago
  Yeah; I find many people in the modern web services world end up using Apache HTTPD as a caching proxy for availability reasons. It's probably just because it's old as hell so everyone knows the config file format by heart, but I know I went with Apache HTTPD on a recent project because the features we needed were only in the paid version of Nginx and we just didn't want to deal with licensing (the dollar amount was trivial in corporate dollars, but it would have taken us months to get the purchase through procurement and the entire rest of the project used open source software). So it's good to have another open source option to keep in mind.
  - therein 11y ago
    What were these features?
    - exelius 11y ago
      Application health checks mostly; though we were using it in a caching server context (static files and non-whitelisted endpoints served directly from Apache vs. hitting the app servers). They're available in Nginx Plus, just not the free version. Again, the pricing wasn't the issue; it was the fact we would have had to go through procurement - which involves a few weeks/months of process at any decently large company. So we ended up using Apache because the team was familiar with it and knew it could support our use case. While Nginx probably would have performed better, in the end it was just easier to use Apache because it was a mature Open Source project and throw a few extra VMs at the caching tier to make up for the performance gap.

Can someone explain how this is different than how most people use Apache HTTPD these days? I'm not trying to be snarky -- I'm genuinely curious.

by exelius 11y ago

Can someone explain how this is different than how most people use Apache HTTPD these days? I'm not trying to be snarky -- I'm genuinely curious.

gruez 11y ago

> Can someone explain how this is different than how most people use Apache HTTPD these days You mean as a reverse proxy / cache server?. I don't have statistics but I would think that most people use apache as a regular http server (serving files or as part of a *AMP stack)

exelius 11y ago
People still use *AMP stacks? Edit: I was serious about that; I was under the impression that most stacks use much lighter weight http daemons than Apache these days. I understand that legacy apps are still out there and not everyone is going to refactor, but anyone developing web applications under Apache in 2016 is just a glutton for punishment...
- mrweasel 11y ago
  I know a hosting company that exclusively deploy Apache, because that's what they know how to configure. Everything that works under nginx, will still work under Apache. If they need more performance, they put Apache behind a Riverbed Stringray/SteelApp/Brocade Trafic Manager (or whatever it's call these days). I think people are being to hard on Apache, it's still a great webserver for a ton of applications. That being said I prefer to configure Nginx over Apache.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    Also, if Apache is configured well, using the Event MPM (or even the older Worker) and sane thread counts for the server it's running on, it's a lot faster than it used to be. I can't say how fast compared to Nginx because literally every comparison between the two I've seen has hamstrung Apache by using the ancient Prefork MPM (and I haven't done a rigorous comparison myself), but I expect it's at least on the same order of magnitude.
    - rhizome 11y ago
      They're both plenty fast for most sites.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  People still use _AMP stacks? Change this to "People still use X?" where the value of X is pretty much any technology you've ever heard of, dating back to the 1970's (if not before). And the answer will, to a first approximation, always be "yes". Now the number of people using X might be small, but you can all but bet your life that somebody, somewhere is, indeed, still using it. And depending on what it is, you might be surprised as how large the number actually is. Keep in mind, HN and Reddit, etc., comprise something of an echo chamber, where people of a certain mindset and orientation flock. The world is MUCH larger. No, RPG on iSeries /AS400 machines isn't "cool" and you won't see it mentioned on HN much (if at all) but this stuff is still used all over the place. LAMP stacks? Yeah, still widely used. OS/2? Not exactly "widely" used, but still used. COBOL? Yep. Fortran? Yep. MVS? Yep. And so on. Now, granted, this stuff isn't used by "hip startups" or "unicorns", but the world is a lot bigger than the SV startup scene. Technologies die VERY slowly for whatever reason, at least in regards to the "long tail" (so to speak) of the usage curve.
  - NeutronBoy 11y ago
    > Now, granted, this stuff isn't used by "hip startups" or "unicorns", but the world is a lot bigger than the SV startup scene. Most of it is used by business that literally manage your life. Banks, electrical and water, manufacturing plants, telephone exchanges, everything.
- jamespo 11y ago
  It seems you're another person who hasn't used Apache since 1.3

pram 11y ago

this is closer to varnish or squid

therein 11y ago

Apache Traffic Server has support for native C++ plugins which allow you to make transformations to the headers and the body as the request and response passes through it. ATS's power comes mainly from these plugins, I would say, rather than just a reverse caching proxy. https://github.com/apache/trafficserver/tree/master/lib/atscppapi https://github.com/apache/trafficserver/tree/master/lib/atsc...

skuhn 11y ago

As others have indicated, it's a proxy server rather than a general purpose webserver. There's no code relation between the two servers; it's simply that the team at Yahoo chose to pursue it as an Apache Foundation project when they open sourced it. ATS scales orders of magnitude better than Apache, due to its process model. Whereas at Yahoo we would budget between 30-200 simultaneous connections per Apache server (prefork), the proxy service which I ran using ATS was budgeted for over 100,000 concurrent connections per machine. It's significantly less featureful than Apache, but it does caching substantially better than any other cache server commonly available (nginx, apache, squid, varnish).

exelius 11y ago
Yeah; I find many people in the modern web services world end up using Apache HTTPD as a caching proxy for availability reasons. It's probably just because it's old as hell so everyone knows the config file format by heart, but I know I went with Apache HTTPD on a recent project because the features we needed were only in the paid version of Nginx and we just didn't want to deal with licensing (the dollar amount was trivial in corporate dollars, but it would have taken us months to get the purchase through procurement and the entire rest of the project used open source software). So it's good to have another open source option to keep in mind.
- therein 11y ago
  What were these features?
  - exelius 11y ago
    Application health checks mostly; though we were using it in a caching server context (static files and non-whitelisted endpoints served directly from Apache vs. hitting the app servers). They're available in Nginx Plus, just not the free version. Again, the pricing wasn't the issue; it was the fact we would have had to go through procurement - which involves a few weeks/months of process at any decently large company. So we ended up using Apache because the team was familiar with it and knew it could support our use case. While Nginx probably would have performed better, in the end it was just easier to use Apache because it was a mature Open Source project and throw a few extra VMs at the caching tier to make up for the performance gap.