On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 12:45:50PM -0500, Jason Czerak (Jasnik) wrote: > Is the 'front end' and 'back end' apache servers on the 'same box'? > My problme is that I had one web server. and I did the FE and BE bit > (BE being on the loop back address). to free up some major resources > since mod_perl apache gets huges. I didn't need 20meg process > serving up 2K images :) and had about 20 to 30 smaller apache > process doing the 'static' content serving.
Yes, that's exactly what I do. > I have found that the memory resource problem doesn't excist with > 2.0 when you compile with 'worker' or fully threaded. I'm running 2 > processes of apache and each of htem have like 20 threaded. > performce seems good with just running one apache server. didn't do > any real load testing, but I'm sure 2.0 is going to blow 1.3.x away. Well, there's multiple benefits of running a separate frontend and backend server: 1. As stated above, the static HTML/GIF/JPG/etc. files don't have to be served by the heavyweight mod_perl process. 2. If the backend is serving a large file, the frontend can retrieve the entire file from the backend and free it up immediately, so that a client with a slow modem will not tie up the backend for the time it takes to download. 3. If you have different sites (presumably owned by different people) on your server, all the backend servers can execute with different userids so that the backend server of one site doesn't have to be able to read the files of another site. And, everyone can change their own server configuration. We know that Apache 2 confers benefit #1 without needing a separate frontend and backend. Benefit #2 seems to be planned, but isn't here yet. ...What about benefit #3?