In this issue

The handling of request bodies in 2.0 was under discussion this week on the development list. The interface used by Apache 1.3 modules to read or discard a request body has been deprecated in 2.0 by the input filtering mechanism. The old interface is still supported, and was found to be causing some problems in handling error responses. Some fixes where committed, and patches were submitted to switch over more modules to use input filtering.

A benchmark comparison of Apache 1.3 and 2.0 was posted this week, comparing the performance of the prefork MPM in 2.0 against 1.3 under increasing client load. Only a small difference was found, with 1.3 coming out slightly ahead. Some informal performance testing of PHP with Apache 2.0 found that it was significantly slower than PHP with 1.3. On the subject of performance, the topic was raised of using a 64-bit build of Apache when using Solaris on SPARC processors (where normally 32-bit applications are used): this can also reduce server performance due to the increased program size.

New releases of Apache 2.0 and 1.3 are expected soon, although there are still several issues listed as "showstoppers" for a 2.0 release. No large changes have been committed to the 1.3 tree since the last release, although many fixes to mod_proxy have been made along with several improvements for the Cygwin port.

It has been a few months since we last reported on new figures from the Netcraft and E-Soft surveys of web sites. Overall there has been little change from month to month. Netcraft find that Apache and servers based on Apache have around 58% market share, and E-Soft report over 66%. In the secure server space, E-Soft find Apache based servers together have just over 55% market share, although the trends show a consistent increase in the use of IIS for secure sites.

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

DevArticles presents "Implementing Sensible 404 Pages With Apache", a tutorial about customising the 404 error page which is returned when the requested URL is not found by the web server. It uses the ErrorDocument directive in a .htaccess file to achieve this. It also provides a list of helpful points on the design and content of the custom 404 page.

"A HOWTO on Optimizing PHP" illustrates the performance difference between a PHP script tuned for scalability and one tuned for speed, identifies the possible bottlenecks in a system, and shows you how to fine-tune Apache 1.3 for PHP. Then it walks you through a benchmarking case study, and ends with a few examples on speeding up your PHP code.

Chapter 10 ("Survival Gear for Web Masters") of the book, "Zope: Web Application Development and Content Management" is all about using Zope with Apache. It looks at the Virtual Host configuration in Apache, uses the RewriteRule directive provided by mod_rewrite, and supports SSL for Zope by using mod_ssl. This chapter may be downloaded from the book's companion website.

New Linux users who have no prior knowledge of Apache 1.3 at all may be interested to check out "Apache 101". This article gives a brief introduction about Apache, talks about the benefits of using it, and skims through the installation steps.