p.a.o.
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Wednesday, December 13. 2006 in ASF
The people.apache.org site now hosts the very cool ASF Community/Committers page (due to the hard work of David Reid). My next step is to hack my committers page (which is more an ASF records housekeeping page) to the FOAF info David's page uses.
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Gotta Love Apache
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Thursday, August 24. 2006 in ASF
Often times I am pleased and proud on how well Apache HTTP Server (OK, OK, "Apache") works and in how many different types of environments it is being used. As much as web servers are commodities and ubiquitous, people forget how they are core parts of the infrastructure.
Consider the two extremes: LAMP type environments where Apache is the web infrastructure, and others where Apache is the conductor. For example, I'm working with a client now (Covalent hat on) that uses Apache pretty much as an intelligent HTTP router. The web server itself does very little web serving, instead directing traffic to either image store servers or backend Weblogic servers. Yet as "simple" as this appears, the actual implementation is complex, with lots of interactions and places where you can get caught up, or mess up performance. But even so, Apache itself provides the fine control and capability that makes it all possible.
What is so cool is how Apache masterfully handles both ends of the spectrum. Yeah, there might be other web servers that are designed for a specific use-cases, but they simply blow chunks when used in other applications. Apache is able to reach 95-98% of what those "special purpose" web servers are supposed to do, yet it fills all the nooks and crannies as well. Having something as general purpose as Apache yet able to also do the jobs of more focused servers is really neat. And it makes life easier for architects and admins.
Gotta love it.
PS: Happy Birthday to my Dad! He's 75 today.
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More proxy work on the httpd trunk
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, July 14. 2006 in ASF
A few days ago I added "hot standby" to the mod_proxy_balancer code in httpd-trunk. This allows for a balancer worker to not be used at all unless all the other workers are unusable (stopped, disabled or in error). Not only does this add useful functionality but it kicked off discussion on other load balance methods (like a cluster set value, kind of like mod_jk's "distance" attribute) as well as how the Proxy module uses the httpd scoreboard.
Apache's scoreboard is a central shared memory structure accessible by all the Apache processes and threads. From the start it's had a very specific function, but it's just so darn useful that there's a real temptation to use it as a central dumping point for all kinds of shared data, which I try to discourage as much as I can. 
So there's discussion now about how to better abstract out the scoreboard, not only to make it easier for modules to "extend" it, without monkeying with it, but also to allow other storage providers to be used. One can see how a memcached-compatible scoreboard would be very useful for load balancing. In essence, I think we're looking at a suite of scoreboards, each for specific purposes, which default to the apr_shm implementation as a baseline. Should be quite useful.
Anyway, I'm looking at other improvements to the proxy balancer, and hope to propose backporting to 2.2.x after sufficient testing and feedback. If you have suggestions or comments, don't hesitate to send them along.
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So there's discussion now about how to better abstract out the scoreboard, not only to make it easier for modules to "extend" it, without monkeying with it, but also to allow other storage providers to be used. One can see how a memcached-compatible scoreboard would be very useful for load balancing. In essence, I think we're looking at a suite of scoreboards, each for specific purposes, which default to the apr_shm implementation as a baseline. Should be quite useful.
Anyway, I'm looking at other improvements to the proxy balancer, and hope to propose backporting to 2.2.x after sufficient testing and feedback. If you have suggestions or comments, don't hesitate to send them along.
AC Europe 2006 et.al.
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Thursday, June 29. 2006 in ASF
I am seriously bummed that I'm not attending ApacheCon Europe this year. From all the reports, postings and blogs it sounds like it's been a great show and a great event. But with vacation timing as well as chaperoning a summer camp just last week, there was no way I could fit it into my schedule... Anyway, that will make the US ApacheCon show in Austin all the sweeter.
Been playing quite a bit with SQLite3 and I'm quite surprised at the sheer number of applications that I can migrate off of MySQL. Of course, these were all applications and scripts that needed more than flat-file or DBM databases, but in which MySQL was "overkill." So SQLite serves a pretty useful and large sweet-spot. Anyway, I've added SQLite to all the jaguNET web servers as well.
Still no update on upgrading my Mac Dual G4. The upgrades I could find all provide faster clock speeds, but the lack of L3 cache means just minimal peformance increases over what I have now. So maybe a G5 is in the cards after all. If I can just convince Eileen...
Over the last 2 days, Maryland has been hit with 12+ inches of rain. Our pool overflowed 3 times, and I needed to drain off the excess water. The sun finally came out yesterday and it was nice having things starting to dry out.
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Apache HTTP Server 1.3.36
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, May 19. 2006 in ASF
Is released
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