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Apache releases first major new version of popular Web server in six years
- cmaxwell 15y agoExpecting to see some meaningless benchmarks soon.
- obituary_latte2 15y agoI have two: 7 and 3
- obituary_latte2 15y ago<strike>Jesus Christ. I've apparently flown into cuntytown. Cleared for landing? I HOPE SO</strike> Ruining the signal/noise ratio. Sorry. And thanks to the one person who took the time to explain.
- scott_s 15y agoWe don't like noise. It hides the signal.
- obituary_latte2 15y ago10-4, HN is srs bidness
- victork2 15y agoYou know you have a good software when people begin to procrastinate on your software by comparing the number of requests / second that your server will accept, knowing that 99.9% will never reach that. Oh and ... Node.js is probably going to be mentioned.
- redslazer 15y agoIf a server can handle a larger number of requests that the same server with different web server could this automatically means resource usage per connection is lower. This is good for everyone ranging from small site to large because it means reduces costs etc.
- gaius 15y agoVery relevant on VPS's.
- rplnt 15y ago3.0 would be major, 2.4 is minor.
- robtoo 15y agoThe headline is "major new version" not "new major version".
- rplnt 15y agoInteresting difference. I've not noticed that. But when I think about it, what does "major new version" mean?
- threepointone 15y agoA "major version" in the software world means an integer bump, like 2.0, 3.0. In this context, "major new version" means a non-patch release, with new features.
- kbutler 15y agonew "major version" is jargon - a term of art with a generally accepted meaning of incrementing the most significant version number. "major" new version is just English - it's a new version with significant enhancements or impact.
- lloeki 15y ago> new "major version" is jargon - a term of art with a generally accepted meaning of incrementing the most significant version number. An example of which would be http://semver.org/ http://semver.org/
- asto 15y agoWhat's with all the downvotes? I thought the exact same thing too till I read the explanations on this thread!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nirvdrum 15y agoI'm pretty sure the Apache httpd server doesn't follow semver at all, given it predates that document by 10 years or so. Any overlap is pretty coincidental or inspired in the reverse direction.
- brianm 15y agoHTTPD follows APR versioning ( http://apr.apache.org/versioning.html http://apr.apache.org/versioning.html ) which semver seems to be based on.
- nirvdrum 15y agoHmm . . . I thought HTTPd used the even/odd convention for stable/development at the minor number level, which I don't see mentioned in that doc. And that would go against semver altogether.
- chbrown 15y ago"While it seems unlikely that NGINX could overcome Apache’s commanding lead ..." Oh zdnet, don't you realize that actions like this release from Apache, obviously under pressure from NGINX, are precisely the indicators that you will be eating your words in a year or two?
- hullo 15y agoI don't think they'll ever need to eat those words. It does indeed seem unlikely that NGINX will pass Apache. Not that it can't happen, but reasonable people would agree that such a thing does seem unlikely.
- batista 15y agoApache might very well be under pressure from NGINX, but getting out a new major release (and after so many years), is DEFINITELY NOT a sing of this. Much less is a new release indicator that Zdnet will be "eating their words in a year or two" regarding Ngix/Apache market share. On the contrary, if this release DOES improve performance a lot and reduces memory usage, on top of all the other savings, it would make it even LESS possible for NGINX to win over Apache. Besides raw performance, there are lots of reasons to use Apache still, from the fact that it's a battle tested server with tons of documentation, know best practices, tools and modules support, knowledgable admins etc available for it. So, if performance is improved, many people won't bother switched that otherwise might have.
- lbotos 15y agoA counter to this is all the people that have switched to NGINX are not going to "jump ship" back to Apache. I'm one of those converts and while this may be great for people who NEED Apache, most people don't need it and may have already made the switch to NGINX.
- absconditus 15y agoExcept that most people did not make the switch. Apache continues to hover around 65% of the market while its next nearest competitor, Microsoft, hovers around 15%. nginx is below 10% and climbing very slowly. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/02/07/february-2012-web-server-survey.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/02/07/february-2012-w...
- Garbage 15y agoOverview of new features in Apache HTTP Server 2.4 http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/new_features_2_4.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/new_features_2_4.html
- waitwhat 15y agoUnfortunately, still no sign of per-host logfiles with dynamic virtual hosts (mod_vhost_alias).
- spydum 15y agoIsn't the beauty of open source the ability to write your own modules? If it's needed, write it.
- mrud 15y agoI think you can solve this by using http://n0rp.chemlab.org/vlogger/ http://n0rp.chemlab.org/vlogger/ You can define one log which has the virtual host as the first field and split the logs after it.
- fanf2 15y agoThat is what we did at Demon Internet where I wrote mod_vhost_alias - except using our own log processing software.
- peterwwillis 15y agohttp://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_heartbeat.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_heartbeat.html It frustrates me when people use ASCII instead of packed bitmaps for things like this (packet transmitted once a second from potentially hundreds or thousands of nodes, that each frontend proxy has to parse into a binary form anyway before using it). Maybe it's a really small amount of CPU but it's just one of many things which could easily be more efficient. Some of this stuff is so simple and useful it's a wonder they weren't there before: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_auth_form.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_auth_form.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_session_dbd.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_session_dbd.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_buffer.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_buffer.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_data.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_data.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_ratelimit.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_ratelimit.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_lua.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_lua.html "mod_ssl can now be configured to share SSL Session data between servers through memcached" "mod_cache is now capable of serving stale cached data when a backend is unavailable (error 5xx)." "Translation of headers to environment variables is more strict than before to mitigate some possible cross-site-scripting attacks via header injection." "mod_rewrite Allows to use SQL queries as RewriteMap functions." "mod_ldap adds LDAPConnectionPoolTTL, LDAPTimeout, and other improvements in the handling of timeouts. This is especially useful for setups where a stateful firewall drops idle connections to the LDAP server." "rotatelogs May now create a link to the current log file." Very nice that they rewrote the mod_rewrite and caching guides with more examples and ease of use in mind. Here are the API changes: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/developer/new_api_2_4.html http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/developer/new_api_2_4.html
- krmmalik 15y agoI guess real world testing is going to be the best indicator of whether this is a worthy release or not, but i sure am very glad that Apache have at least attempted to up their game. Even if they are not able to deliver on their promise, the effort is noble enough - at least for now. Personally, i'm very glad to see performance considerations being taken seriously, and even if nginx or node.js don't take over the world, its nice to see that they're forcing others to sit up and think.
- bwarp 15y agoNever underestimate the power of "good enough". Apache is "good enough" for most people. NGINX or Node.js really don't bring much new to the table of "good enough". It's why plan 9 isn't as popular as it probably should be. UNIX was good enough.
- scott_w 15y agoI disagree. Nginx brings a lot to the table in simplicity and ease-of-use. Just reading an nginx.conf and comparing it to an httpd.conf should be enough to convince you what nginx brings to the table.
- bwarp 15y agoI think it's about the same. One looks like XML but isn't. the other looks like C but isn't.
- brianm 15y agoA great deal of he complexity comes from OS vendors doing nigh-unspeakable things to httpd.conf. The default httpd.conf from Apache is a bit gnarly too, but compared to what redhat or ubuntu do... not cool. The mandatory configuration is actually pretty minimal, especially if you are using it as an app server. Take, for example, http://kasparov.skife.org/blog/src/wombat/httpd-conf-cool.html http://kasparov.skife.org/blog/src/wombat/httpd-conf-cool.ht... which sets up a bunch of mod_wombat (precurser to now-bundled mod_lua) stuff.
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- xpose2000 15y agoI'm excited. Even if it is only a 5% to 10% improvement in performance, then that buys me a little bit more headroom on my current server setup. I look forward to testing it out down the road.
- etomer 15y agoGet your faces off of your articles' headers!
- jbarham 15y agoIt may sound trivial, but the thing I appreciate most about Nginx is its lightweight config file syntax. It's very easy to glance over and see what's been set up compared to Apache's verbose pseudo-XML syntax which is about the worst syntax you can come up with: the verbosity of XML but without the benefit of being able to generate or parse it using standard XML tools!
- antihero 15y agoYep, it's utterly dire. People bitch about X11 config files, but this is in many ways worse because it pretends to be XML. It'd be nice to submit a patch for Apache so it can read YAML, XML, and JSON based configuration. Or even just some sort of consistent fucking format, so we can generate configs for a bunch of servers with lxml or something. The other thing that fucks me off is that the server will reboot happily and fail to start without having first checked that it can start, and configtest doesn't pick up things like directories being missing.
- gpmcadam 15y ago> and configtest doesn't pick up things like directories being missing. Uh, last time I checked (Apache 2.2.17 (Ubuntu)) it did. # apache2ctl configtest Warning: DocumentRoot [/dev/null/doesnt/even/exist] does not exist
- benjiweber 15y agoNginx config gets pretty hairy as soon as you try and do anything unforseen. Just read http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil for a start. Lots of things can only be done with ifs (unless you write a custom module) The "What to do instead" doesn't work for things that aren't simple rewrite rules. There are seemingly arbitrary rules for what contexts you can have conditionals in, what commands can be in conditionals. There is no support for ands, ors, or nested ifs.
- justincormack 15y agoDon't use if. Use the Lua module if you need to do complex stuff, or another one.
- tutu55634 15y agoMicro Benchmark of Apache 2.4 vs Nginx 1.0: http://blog.causal.ch/2012/02/micro-benchmark-apache-24-vs-nginx-10.html http://blog.causal.ch/2012/02/micro-benchmark-apache-24-vs-n...