In this issue

Apache Site: www.apache.org
Release: 1.3.6 (Released 25^th March 1999) (local download sites)
Beta: None

Apache 1.3.6 is the current stable release. Users of Apache 1.3.4 and earlier on Unix systems should upgrade to this version. Read the Guide to 1.3.6 for information about changes between 1.3.4 and 1.3.6 and between 1.2 and 1.3.6.

Most bugs listed below include a link to the entry in the Apache bug database where the problem is being tracked. These entries are called "PR"s (Problem Reports). Some bugs do not correspond to problem reports if they are found by developers.

These bugs have been found in 1.3.6 and will be fixed in the next release. Because of the major differences between Windows and Unix, these are separated into bugs which affect Windows systems only, and other bugs (which may affect Windows as well). Unix users can ignore the bugs listed in the Windows section.

Windows-specific Bugs

• 16-bit applications running under CGI would fail to run. PR#2494

Patches for bugs in Apache 1.3.6 will be made available in the apply_to_1.3.6 subdirectory of the patches directory on the Apache site. Some new features and other unofficial patches are available in the 1.3 patches directory. For details of all previously reported bugs, see the Apache bug database and known bugs pages. Many common configuration questions are answered in the Apache FAQ.

From the next version of Apache, error messages sent by a CGI script will be logged to the error log. This is the same behaviour as Apache on Unix.

Apache has also been upgraded to use Winsock 2. This will allow Apache to use some of the new and enhanced API's. Windows 95 users may need to update their TCP/IP stack in order to be able to run Winsock 2 applications such as Apache.

Patches have been submitted that are designed to improve the performance of Apache when measured by the SPECweb96 benchmark. The patches can give up to a ten fold increase in speed on a dual processor SGI Irix machine. Of course the speed increase may vary substantially on other platforms, and the patches have been designed to specifically give good benchmark figures.

Benchmarks do not give a true picture of the speed of a web server, since they provide an environment unlike the real use of the software. Commercial software is often tuned to perform well in benchmarks, so a good performance simply indicates that the software works well for that benchmark, not that it has good real-world performance.

An effort has been made to port Apache to work on the BeOS operating system. Unfortunately the BeOS system has a technical limitation with the sharing of sockets. Sockets can only be shared between threads and Apache for Unix uses multiple processes not threads. For Apache to work well on BeOS it will need to use a different process model, something currently being worked on for future versions.

PC Week recently released more details of their new Linux vs NT benchmarks in PC Week Labs' tests show what path Linux must take. They found that NT still outperfomed Linux under heavy loads, and that NT was better at making use of multi-processor machines. PC Week also compared Apache to the Zeus server on Linux and found that the two gave very similar results.

c'T magazine published an English version of their recent comprehensive benchmark results in Linux and NT as Web Server on the Test Bed.

The announcement last week of the formation of the Apache Software Foundation was picked up by a number of news sources. One of these articles was Apache incorporates, creates new structure in PC Week. When this article was first released it included details of the Apache Group having stocks traded on NASDAQ (confusing the group with another commercial entity under the name "APCH").

Wired Online's article, Apache Now in Good Company makes a different mistake, saying that Apache is "a free Web server based on Linux".

We previously reported that the popular Microsoft Hotmail service was powered by Apache. This week it was discovered that the Microsoft Networks' homepage service at http://homepages.msn.com/ is running Apache version 1.3.6 on Unix.