In this issue

The controversial topic of a gzip content compression module for Apache 2.0 was brought up this week and discussion on the development list soon descended into a vitriolic flamewar, ranging from whether many or few modules should be distributed with Apache, down to personal abuse between list members.

The HTTP/1.1 specification describes how an HTTP client indicates that it can handle compressed content by sending an Accept-Encoding header with each request. The server may then choose to compress the response using one of the compression schemes which the client claimed to support.

The mod_gzip module produced by HyperSpace Communications adds support for the gzip compression scheme to Apache 1.3. This week a mod_gz module was independently contributed, which implements a gzip compression filter for Apache 2.0, providing similar functionality to mod_gzip. One important difference between the two modules is that mod_gzip includes its own gzip implementation, whereas mod_gz relies on an external zlib library.

The authors of mod_gzip indicated that a 2.0 port of their code was under development, but would not be publicly released until the next 2.0 beta release. After a heated debate comprising of over a hundred messages, it was made clear that mod_gzip would not be submitted for inclusion in 2.0. Despite this, a consensus has not yet emerged on whether mod_gz will be included in 2.0.

It has been a couple of months since we last reported on new figures from the Netcraft and E-Soft surveys of web sites. Netcraft find that Apache and servers based on Apache have just under 60% market share, and E-Soft report just over 61%. In the secure server space, E-Soft find little difference with Apache and Stronghold together having 61% market share.

The E-Soft report goes into a lot of interesting detail, showing information such as the versions of servers being used and most popular modules. We found it interesting that nearly 100 thousand sites are still reporting they are running on Apache 1.2 ( Apache 1.3 was released over three years ago). The most popular Apache module is still PHP, available on nearly half of all Apache sites.

In this section we highlight some of the articles on the web that are of interest to Apache users.

PHPBuilder take a look at "using Webalizer to analyze Apache logs". Webalizer is a freely available log analysis tool written in C that is designed for speed; even on a modest machine it can handle tens of thousands of log lines a second. However it can be tricky to get Webalizer installed, so this article takes you step by step through how to get it installed and running.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier walks you through ways of improving your Apache performance in "HTTP Benchmarking, Part 3". The article focusses on Linux systems, looking at tuning both your hardware, server configuration, and modules.