Apache 2 performance

anyone else tried it?

[dingman]

I am, slightly unwillingly, trying out Apache 2 on my development machine at work, because and upgrade to Red Hat 9 switched me to Apache 2, and the effort to get it configured to support my current project was far less than what would have been necessary to roll back to 1.3.x. It's mostly a positive experience so far.

As it happens, I've got code in my current project to display the execution time of the script on each page load, to help me figure out which optimizations actually change anything noticably. Pages that are mostly database interaction seem to be loading in about the same time, but ones that access a file on disk, while still much faster than database access, seem to be taking 4-50 times as long to run. (Still under a second, though.)

Has anyone else noticed such things? I'm wondering if it makes a difference which mpm you use, but haven't tested anything yet.

[drbrain]

Don't be fooled by attempting premature optimization. If it doesn't effect your users (still under a second) why bother?

Are you sure it isn't RH9, or some other thing you've changed in the upgrade?

Could you run Apache2 under your previous OS to compare?

Remember, if it doesn't effect your user experience, why should you care? It would make more effective use of your time to just mark it as a potential improvement point in case it ever does become a problem.

[dingman]

if it doesn't effect your user experience, why should you care?

Curiosity, of course. :)

Don't be fooled by attempting premature optimization.

Nah. The reason for the timing info was that the pages used to take 17-18 seconds in some cases. That was what I wanted to optimize, and did. Those cases are now down to about a second and a half, and didn't suffer from the switch to Apache 2.

Are you sure it isn't RH9, or some other thing you've changed in the upgrade?

Not at all. As I said, I haven't tested anything yet. Since it's at work, the page load times are still quite acceptable, and I don't have a simillar machine at home to test on, I probably won't.

Could you run Apache2 under your previous OS to compare?

Unfortunately not, since I only have one development box at work, and I don't feel curios enough to wipe the disk and start over. I could probably write some code with similar performance constraints and try things out on my own machines at home under both, though. (I'm not taking the code from work home because I don't even *know* who owns what I write on the clock, but I'm pretty sure it's not me.)

[eraldemukian]

Redhat8 (kernel 2.4.18) Apache2.0.40 caused allot of trouble for me.
That version had massive memory leaks. Basically the machine would be swapping after a couple of hours.

I got clean source for apache2.0.44 and that fixed it.

Not sure about modperl though, I think that was broken in 2.0.40, and I am not sure if 2.0.44 did fix it.

[Duckula]

...but ones that access a file on disk...

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, check the disk configuration with hdparm.