All, 

I was once offered money to provide a high-performance Apache configuration 
file for a website.  When I pointed out that I would need to come in, analyze 
their app and its performance, and then iteratively tune the config 
accordingly, I was given to understand that this was not necessary.  Just send 
us the config, please.  They were highly miffed when I didn't lay that 
particular flavor of golden egg for them.  I actually got fired from that gig.  

On Jun 1, 2010, at 5:50 AM, Plüm, Rüdiger, VF-Group wrote:

> And others have argued well to leave it off by default. My personal opinion 
> is that we should leave it disabled by default for the reasons (CPU, Proxies, 
> Browser behaviour, ETAG problem) mentioned by others.

I thought it isn't in the default build because it requires an external library 
that may not be on the system.  If this is not of concern, we might as well 
turn it on in the default build.  Same for mod_ssl.  

Generally, I think we see the build and runtime configuration as a starting 
point from which to create your own environment, not a canonical default that 
is right for all (or even most) users.  

Distributors (Red Hat et. al.) should (and do) build httpd according to the 
capabilities of their environment.  If that environment includes libz and 
openssl, no reason why packagers shouldn't build those modules.  Including 
those features is good for their customers. 

As others have pointed out, a lot of performance tuning is highly site and 
situation specific.  Once again the default configuration file cannot be 
expected to cover all possible situations.  Deflate, caching, load balancing, 
proxying, content segregation, etc. can only be optimally configured only in 
the context of the individual deployment.  

If there were a silver bullet to making the web server "fast", don't you think 
we would have fired it some time in the past 15 years?  There is no such thing. 
 The only way to get a handle on it is to read the books, figure it out, or 
hire a consultant.  But don't expect him to lay any golden performance eggs. 

S.

-- 
Sander Temme
scte...@apache.org
PGP FP: 51B4 8727 466A 0BC3 69F4  B7B8 B2BE BC40 1529 24AF



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