Brennan’s Blog

I visited the Apache website which showed me they are now calling Apache 1.3 a legacy release. I had been sticking with the 1.3 branch for various reasons. First, it was built largely to improve support for the Windows platform and I was running a FreeBSD 4.x server. A key feature to support on the Windows platform was threading, but FreeBSD in the 4.x branch was undergoing major changes in that area so moving to Apache 2.0 was not advisable. A bit of time has now past and I am now running a FreeBSD 5.x server. The thread model has stabilized and so has the Apache 2.x. So it was time to bite the bullet.

So far it appears to be working quite well. Support for HTTP compression (gzip), Url Rewriting (mod_rewrite) and PHP5 has been simple enough to set up. The configuration for Apache 2.2 also seems to be well organized with each of the major configuration sections isolated to external files which are integrated with the Include directive. And since it is using threading it appears to be much more efficient in terms of memory usage. It also seems to be just as responsive or better than Apache 1.3. All in all, I was able to get Apache 2.2 to do everything I has Apache 1.3 doing previously.

In a few days I will post more about what I did and how it has been performing.