The Site With the Lamp

August 11, 2005

Though Apache 2 has been around for a long long time, I have been using apache 1.3 upto now, primarily because PHP can only be used with the Prefork model. But the time has come to move on or get left behind.

That does not mean that this is the first time I am installing Apache 2, on the contrary I tried one of the first releases of version 2, and have been occaisionally trying out new releases just to keep in touch. This is the first time though that I will start to use it on a regular basis.

Since prefork is the threading model to use, my configuration directive went something like this:

The nonportable-atomics is an optimization directive and the deflate module will result in files being compressed as they are delivered.

The bottleneck on most servers is the hard disk and bandwith not the processor. You will find that CPU usage rarely goes above 10-20% on most server. So let's put that to good use by compressing the web pages so that they can be downloaded quickly even on a slow connection.

The next step was to recompile PHP and having done that started up apache and to immidiatley ran into an error.

That's a surprise. I don't even have a .htacess file. So for good measure I made an empty file and made it world readable. Still no luck. Then I set AllowOverRide to None. Now the error changes.

I am pretty sure I have the permissions setup correctly. The files are owned by me. The group is nobody. They are readable by both the group and owner but others may not change into these directories or read the files. Hang on a second what is the group that Apache 2 is running under?

It's #-1 What on earth is that? let's change it back to nobody and give it a restart. Yep. It works now. deflate works too. I have set it up for all the non image types to be compressed.

Someone using mod_deflate to compress their downloads, and using Rad Upload to compress their uploads can save a hell of a lot of bandwith.