[lug] [OT] Apache 1.3 vs. 2.0 on Linux

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Thursday 29 April 2004 06:46 pm, Dhruva B. Reddy wrote:
> My company is getting ready to migrate from IIS to Apache on RHEL 3.0.
> Our websites are written in Java, and run on Tomcat (with the web server
> serving static content).
>
> I did some research a while ago which suggests that the main benefit of
> Apache 2.0 is its multithreadedness.  I am under the impression that the
> overhead of forking processes in Linux is relatively low, and therefore
> 2.0 doesn't buy you much (especially considering the maturity and module
> support of 1.3).

It's not the overhead of forking that is important, it is that apache 1.3 
forks a bunch of processes and that's all you get.  If you run out, it 
doesn't start any more.  On theother hand, if you decide to fork a whole 
bunch then you are using up a lot of resources that you don't need to use up 
most of the time.

Apache 2 is much more flexible.  It can start new threads when it needs one.  
It can join threads when too many are idle.

For your uses it sounds like apache 1.3 is fine, since you aren't doing 
anything fancy with it.  You could even eliminate it entirely.

Michael