On Sat, 30 Oct 1999, Leslie Mikesell wrote:
> According to Matt Sergeant:
>
> > > >Would it be possible to have a generic server, like Apache, but not just
> > > >for HTTP - something that could also serve up NNTP connections, FTP
> > > >connections, etc. It seems to me at first look this should be possible.
> > > >
> > > >As I can see it there's a few key components to Apache:
> > > >
> > > >forking tcp/ip server
> > > >file caching/sending
> > > >header parsing
> > > >logging
> > >
> > > Sounds a lot like inetd to me, IMHO.
> >
> > Maybe I'm wrong, but inetd is just #1 of those points. And slow too.
>
> Inetd just decides which server to start for which protocol, and
> the only slow part is starting up a large program which may need
> to read a config file. However you didn't explain why you would
> like to replace these typically small and fast programs with
> a 10-20Meg mod_perl process. I can see where having a common
> modular authentication method would be useful, but what else would
> they have in common?
Well I'll show by example. Take slash (the perl scripts for slashdot.org) -
it's got a web front end and now available is an NNTP front end. Wouldn't
it be nice to run both in-process under mod_perl, so you could easily
communicate between the two, use the same logging code, use the same core
modules, etc. That's what I'm thinking of.
Besides that, with a mod_perl enabled generic server rather than an inetd
server there's no loading config files for each request, no starting a
process, and Apache 2.0 (and I'm assuming mod_perl) will be available as a
threaded server, so it's only 1 10-20M process, not 100+.
--
<Matt/>
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