Re: recommendation for image server with modperl
I did try thttpd. As I understood it, and I did send an email to acmesoftware to ask but got no reply, thttpd does not handle keep-alive, and indeed users complained that images "came in slowly". I also observed this. I'm happy to be corrected, maybe I picked up the wrong version or did not study the source carefully enough. I could not find any config variables relating to keep-alive either.. I found some benchmarks which showed mathopd and thttpd similar in speed. Only linux kernel httpd can do better than either.. but request rates per second of 1000+ is of academic interest only.. -Justin On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 08:37:23PM -0800, Perrin Harkins wrote: On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Justin wrote: I've been catching up on the modperl list archives, and would just like to recommend "mathopd" as an image web server. I think you'll find thttpd (http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/) faster and somewhat better documented. However, I'd like to point out that we've had no problems using Apache as an image server. We need the ability to serve HTTPS images, which mathopd and thttpd can't do, but more than that we've found the performance to be more than good enough with a stripped down Apache server. After having difficulties with the sheer number of front end apache processes necessary to handle 10 backend modperls, (difficulties: high load average and load spikes, kernel time wasted scheduling lots of httpds, higher than expected latency on simple requests) Load averages are tricky beasts. The load can get high on our machines when many processes are running, but it doesn't seem to mean much: almost no CPU is being used, the network is not saturated, the disk is quiet, response is zippy, etc. This leads me to think that these load numbers are not significant. Select-based servers are very cool though, and a good option for people who don't need SSL and want to squeeze great performance out of budget hardware. - Perrin -- Justin Beech http://www.dslreports.com Phone:212-269-7052 x252 FAX inbox: 212-937-3800 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- http://dslreports.com/contacts
recommendation for image server with modperl
Hi, I've been catching up on the modperl list archives, and would just like to recommend "mathopd" as an image web server. After having difficulties with the sheer number of front end apache processes necessary to handle 10 backend modperls, (difficulties: high load average and load spikes, kernel time wasted scheduling lots of httpds, higher than expected latency on simple requests), I switched all images to another IP address on the same box (extending their IMG SRC somewhat obviously), but now served by mathopd. Mathopd is a simple select based, http 1.1 (keep alive) compliant tiny webserver that is very configurable. I was doubtful that it would hold up (it comes with zero documentation .. the docs say "read the source"). But it has not crashed *once*, and its very nice to see just one 22mb process with 500+ minutes of cpu time (for several weeks of work), and have images come in fast and reliably. It uses select and as many file handles for a proc as you have. If load increases beyond (say) your limit of 1024 fds, it re-uses currently unused but kept-alive fds, meaning a graceful degradation. It is also exceedingly fast, much faster than apache serving images (that doesnt matter, but it does mean its frugal with your CPU). Of course I still have 120+ apache httpds (now just being front end for *page* requests), and my wish is that mathopd would add proxy and regexp rewrite capability, then I could do away with apache completely on the front end !! or I guess apache2 with mod_rewrite and mod_proxy would solve that, at the risk of thread related teething problems. Just a recommendation from left field. -Justin
Re: recommendation for image server with modperl
Tell me more... How about memory leaks mod_perl issues? Justin wrote: Hi, I've been catching up on the modperl list archives, and would just like to recommend "mathopd" as an image web server. After having difficulties with the sheer number of front end apache processes necessary to handle 10 backend modperls, (difficulties: high load average and load spikes, kernel time wasted scheduling lots of httpds, higher than expected latency on simple requests), I switched all images to another IP address on the same box (extending their IMG SRC somewhat obviously), but now served by mathopd. Mathopd is a simple select based, http 1.1 (keep alive) compliant tiny webserver that is very configurable. I was doubtful that it would hold up (it comes with zero documentation .. the docs say "read the source"). But it has not crashed *once*, and its very nice to see just one 22mb process with 500+ minutes of cpu time (for several weeks of work), and have images come in fast and reliably. It uses select and as many file handles for a proc as you have. If load increases beyond (say) your limit of 1024 fds, it re-uses currently unused but kept-alive fds, meaning a graceful degradation. It is also exceedingly fast, much faster than apache serving images (that doesnt matter, but it does mean its frugal with your CPU). Of course I still have 120+ apache httpds (now just being front end for *page* requests), and my wish is that mathopd would add proxy and regexp rewrite capability, then I could do away with apache completely on the front end !! or I guess apache2 with mod_rewrite and mod_proxy would solve that, at the risk of thread related teething problems. Just a recommendation from left field. -Justin -- BLH www.RentZone.org
Re: recommendation for image server with modperl
On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Justin wrote: I've been catching up on the modperl list archives, and would just like to recommend "mathopd" as an image web server. I think you'll find thttpd (http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/) faster and somewhat better documented. However, I'd like to point out that we've had no problems using Apache as an image server. We need the ability to serve HTTPS images, which mathopd and thttpd can't do, but more than that we've found the performance to be more than good enough with a stripped down Apache server. After having difficulties with the sheer number of front end apache processes necessary to handle 10 backend modperls, (difficulties: high load average and load spikes, kernel time wasted scheduling lots of httpds, higher than expected latency on simple requests) Load averages are tricky beasts. The load can get high on our machines when many processes are running, but it doesn't seem to mean much: almost no CPU is being used, the network is not saturated, the disk is quiet, response is zippy, etc. This leads me to think that these load numbers are not significant. Select-based servers are very cool though, and a good option for people who don't need SSL and want to squeeze great performance out of budget hardware. - Perrin
