Stephan Ullmann writes "Another nice story on the Heise Newsticker: According to this study (in German) from the Swiss WWW-Performance Index, WWW sites using MS IIS have on average twice as much downtime as sites with Apache. To obtain these values they were monitoring 100 big Swiss Internet sites every five minutes for a period of more than three months. They logged the downtime and the latency of the machines. Furthermore, they mentioned that there are a number of sites with IIS that are rebooted every day at the same time ;-) On average in all categories the servers had a weekly downtime of 99 minutes." Better check out Babelfish if you don't sprechen Sie Deutsch.

Mr. Ed asks: "Hi! We run a very busy subscription-based service and we receive about 1,000,000 hits per day. My question is what is the best way to deal with this? DBM based access isn't very flexible and so I would like to switch to MySQL/mod_auth_mysql but MySQL doesn't seem to be able to deal with the load very well. What is everyone else doing? Am I going to have to go to a closed commercial solution or is there some open source software that can handle this sort of a beating? Thanks in advance!" We've talked about optimizing Apache/MySql in a production environment, but this sounds more of a configuration problem. Thoughts?

The January 2000 Netcraft survey is out, with Apache showing a 1% gain in share. What is interesting is that, with the exception of Netscape, all other servers suffered a decrease (or no change at all), according to the survey.

your jesus writes "mod_backhand is a drop-in load balancer Apache module that was released by CNDS (under a BSD-style license -- source available). We are looking for people who want to play with it, use it, love it, or just plain send it through the rigorous testing. This project has the potential to replace some of the most expensive load balancing appliances out there with JBOAS (Just a Bunch of Apache Servers).
What do y'all think?"

schave writes "Apache 1.3.11 has just been uploaded to http://www.apache.org/. It should show up at your favorite mirror site within the next 24 hours. 1.3.11 is mostly contains bug fixes, and should be the last 1.3.X release before Apache 2.0." jimjag adds: UPDATE 1/22/99 at 4:30pm Eastern: The official Announcement has gone out and the Apache site now reflects the new release. Distribution tarballs are always uploaded "early" to give mirrors a chance to grab them before the Announcement is made and people bang the servers to grab it :)

First submitted by AC: "VeriSign has announced the availability of their 128 bit global server IDs for the Covalent SSL module, Raven. This looks very promising for the Apache community especially with the easing of encryption export controls by the U.S. Bureau of Export Administration."

The Java Apache Project announced the release of Apache JServ 1.1, a JSDK 2.0 Servlet engine for Apache. Improved installation, performance and stability had been the main goals for this release. The project itself involves the design of a 100% pure Java servlet engine fully compliant with the JavaSoft Java Servlet APIs 2.0 specification.

PHP 3.0.14 was released on January 11, 2000 to address an obscure safe-mode bug reported on bugtraq. Along with this fix, 3.0.14 also patches an annoying GD-related configure problem. No new features have been added, so unless these 2 issues affect you, there's no real need to upgrade. On the Windows side the slightly broken 3.0.13 distribution has been fixed and ZIP file now contains all the needed files.

In celebration of Y2K, the PHP Project has released the long awaited latest version of PHP: 3.0.13. Included with this release are loads of additions and fixes. Now that's reason for a toast!

According to the December Netcraft survey, Apache can now be found running on over 5 million sites. Overall, Apache's "market share" dropped about a third of a percent, with the biggest change being a 0.77% increase by Zeus mostly due to its use by UUNet.

Jade writes "According to this CNet article, Covalent Technology just got $5 million in venture funding. They're comparing their Apache support & services as similar to Red Hat's Linux services, and of course bring up the idea of a future IPO. I'm curious if this is really the case, or just media hype...opinions? " I think Apache is probably Linux's greatest success story, but I'm perplexed on this one.

The Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms project has made a generous proposal to the Apache Software Foundation: They are looking for help in solving part of Certicom's ECC Challenge. If they win, they will give donate $8000 of the $10000 prize to the ASF, with the remaining $2000 being divided between the 2 volunteers who find the match (so it's $1000 each). It's a cool challenge, a piece of cake to participate and it helps out your favorite server.

the gaijin writes "I'm looking for an alternative to Netscape Proxy Server, ideally using Linux and an Apache SSL variant. Our architecture follows the "reverse secure proxy model": A proxy server (Solaris + Netscape, 2 machines in round robin) handles HTTPS requests from a browser client. The proxy decodes the request and passes it as an HTTP request to one of the many application servers. The application server returns an HTTP response to the proxy, which then encodes the response and returns HTTPS to the browser client. (Application servers are actually grouped into farms defined by a Radware loadbalancing appliance; the proxy talks to the farms-- but the proxy is unaware of this). Has anyone implemented a model like this using the Apache proxying facilities, using one of the SSL variants? Is it possible? " jimjag writes: There's an article in Web Techniques that shows how to use mod_proxy and mod_rewrite to implement one layer of the above: the reverse proxying part.

Romulux writes "Active server pages are pretty bitchen. Can databases be integrated in this way using Linux. " I'm not sure if Romulux's main desire is access to databases or whether it's the capability to use ASP under Linux (and Apache). If the former, of course there's PHP and Perl scripting, with their inherent database connectivity. If it's just ASP then there are at least a few Apache modules that implement this. Anyone know of more?

David Carlin writes "SunHelp.org has a link in the Rumor Mill about Apache and Perl5 being included in Solaris 8. Click here for the official word from Sun. "

The latest Netscraft Survey is out. Apache enjoyed an over 1 percent increase, with Microsoft and Netscape showing some decreases. According to the survey, Apache has a 54.81 percent "market share." Also reported is the fact that Webjump actuals uses a hybrid setup with NT serving static content and the dynamic content with a Solaris/Apache/Perl system. Tucked away in the report is a small factoid that PHP is on over 1.1 million domains.

If you use Apache, chances are that you use Analog as your web log file analyser . Well, Analog 4.0 was just released yesterday (11/16). Better performance and more options make this a worthwhile upgrade.

PHP version 4.0b3-RC5 (meaning PHP4, beta3, release-candidate 5) has been announced by the PHP Development Team. PHP is an extremely popular module for Apache and other web servers, as shown by this usage report obtained using Netcraft results. The PHP4 website still only refers to Beta2, though you can grab this Beta3 RC via CVS.
UPDATE: 11/16/99: PHP4.0b3 (the real thing) is released. Available here!

As reported in this week's ApacheWeek, the preliminary session schedule for ApacheCon 2000 is available. The Conference Planning Committee received over double the number of session abstracts required to fill the available slots.

With the posting of it's first Press Release, the new Apache XML Project is officially launched. Also, the website itself is open to the public. The project itself contains 4 sub-projects:

• Xerces - XML parsers in Java, C++, and Perl
• Xalan - XSLT stylesheet processors, in Java and C++
• Cocoon - XML-based web publishing, in Java
• FOP - XSL formatting objects, in Java

We now have some meat to talk about :)