Competition for WEB Servers

Source: http://blog.csdn.net/AppleBBS/

Reprinted
A few days ago, I suddenly wanted to find a Web server with better performance than Apache. I remember that I was in a large BBS (which has been forcibly disabled by relevant departments) we can see that they are running a 64-bit open-source WebServer on the AMD64 server, which is three times faster than Apache. So I went to Google to find it. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of the WebServer at all.
Unexpectedly, I saw such an article, which gave me a general understanding of some Web servers I didn't know before!
 
Summary

Sometimes Apache is everywhere. Everyone is running Apache, and even the dogs that contain Apache run their own Apache :). But even so, there are still many other types of Web servers to choose from. This article provides a comprehensive comparison of mainstream Web servers on the market.

WEB Server

Apache is everywhere and can run on multiple system platforms, including Linux and Soloris. Apache is the undisputed leader in the network market. Apache is used in almost any tutorial on Network Management about Web servers. Of course, Apache is chosen for many very adequate reasons. After all, the choice of 16 million users (according to the statistics in the Netcraft survey report) is unlikely to be wrong. However, there is no need to follow the trend. Web Services may need to be diversified. The GNU/Linux philosophy is to choose a suitable tool based on your own needs and actual conditions.

Maybe your choice focuses more on speed and reliability, rather than on the Internet. Maybe you just want to find a clean and easy-to-configure web server. No matter what you choose, there is always a lot of software to meet your needs. In this article, we will analyze and compare a variety of web servers and provide the basis for users to select the most suitable Web servers.

Writing a basic web server is very simple. You only need to listen to the appropriate port, establish a connection, and send data. Writing such servers and client development are always complementary. The birth of the two marks the beginning of WWW. In 1990s, browsers, web servers, HTML and HTTP protocols were rapidly developed. Then the server becomes developed by NCSA, and the corresponding server becomes the NCSA Web server. The browser changes from Mosaic to Netscape Navigator. NCSA is still available. Although it is no longer maintained and continues development, it can still download its source code for free. It is the predecessor of the famous web server Apache.

However, a client, a protocol, and a network environment are required for such a connection. However, as the Internet continues to develop, web servers need more functions to meet the client's demand for more dynamic content. Apache has developed an extension module to meet this requirement. However, when web services become a technology that many business applications must face and adopt, there are many different web servers to meet these different needs. Scalability, reliability, speed, and advanced dynamic functions are all key factors for web servers, especially in e-commerce application environments. Ease of configuration and management is equally important for new users.

None of these features can fully meet the requirements of a specific server. However, if you have a clear understanding of your web service requirements, therefore, one of all web servers must meet your needs.

Apache 1.3.19

Apache is still the greatest all-around player. Maybe it is too large and has a long history, but it should be better developed with its excellent performance and a large number of user groups. With regard to its flexibility and rich features, Apache is a standard for web servers compared with other web servers tested here. Unless you have been isolated from the world for the past four years, you will surely see a lot of news articles cheering on Apache's success and use it as a success example of open source code. Apache does not use the GPL copyright statement, but uses its own Apache Server copyright statement, which emphasizes the free use of source code. Apache is also famous for its "patch server" because Apache was developed in the early days by adding patches to the httpd code of NCSA. Apache is regarded as a patch server. Due to its modular nature, Apache is flexible and scalable, and developers can easily add third-party functional modules by using this feature, the module developers can add any function. The module is the functional basis of many content management systems, such as Midgard and Zope.

Apache is installed as the default configuration in almost all Linux releases. SuSE 7.1 is even pre-installed with Apache that includes various advanced module options, such as PHP3, mod_perl, and LDAP. Users will be surprised to find that a powerful web server is available after the system is successfully installed. Although installing Apache is not very simple, it is worthwhile to download the source code package and compile the new Apache if Apache with new features or security patches is released. Apache not only has a large user base, but also has a wide range of Configuration documentation.

The Apache main configuration file is in plain text format. conf. With the development of Apache, some other configuration files gradually die out and tend to use a single configuration file httpd. conf to store all configuration commands, such as customer access information, authentication information, and virtual servers. The Apache configuration option adopts the command mode. The configuration command sets the values of various parameters. For example, DocumentRoot sets the root directory on the web page of the server. You can also flexibly set up multiple virtual Web Servers Based on IP addresses or domain names. These web virtual servers can define independent DocumentRoot configuration commands. The LoadModule command is used to specify the loading of different modules to expand the functions of the Apache server. Most of these new features provide server-side support for script technology, such as Perl and PHP. Apache can use ApacheJServ in combination to support Java servlets and JSP.

Many modules of Apache implement security protection: for example, mod_auth provides proper protection for data on the server, while the SSL module is used to protect the communication security between the server and the client.

For most users, manual editing of lengthy httpd. conf files is boring and error-prone. Fortunately, both Linuxconf and webmin in Redhat provide excellent Apache configuration templates. The GUI project of Aapche also provides Comanche and Mohawk to configure and manage Apache graphics. These tools greatly reduce the difficulty of managing and configuring Apache, but understanding httpd. conf is very important for configuring high-performance servers.

Apache is declared in many places that Apache is not the fastest web server. Apache developers have not considered developing a super-fast web server. The function and stability are more factors to consider. However, Apache runs normally in many websites with heavy loads and does not get too many complaints about performance. In our performance tests using webstone, we found that Apache ranked first in throughput and had the least errors. In the test, although Apache has the strongest scalability, it is still the fastest server that provides so many features.

Zeus Webserver3.3.8 Server

Zeus is a commercial web server product. Recently it has become the headlines of many industry media, it was reported that the performance of the Zeus server was improved by as much as 2.4 In the 85% kernel + SMP environment compared with that in the 2.2.x kernel environment. Speed is always the selling point of the Zeus server. It is often commented that if you want to test the performance of Linux as a server operating system, run Zeus for testing.

The Zeus server has excellent scalability in the SMP environment and implements a set of common features, such as Access Control, dynamic content generation, and security. It is a good choice for high-end applications because of its robustness, cluster-supported fault tolerance, load balancing, and other characteristics.

The installation and management of the Zeus server is relatively simple. The software is in the package format of tar.gz. to install the software, you only need to extract the package and run an installation script. It takes only a few minutes to install the software on a machine with proper performance. The Zeus server provides web-based Remote Management after installation.

The management of Zeus is divided into two parts: the management configuration part includes the configuration and access to the management server itself, and the web configuration part includes the configuration of various features of the web server, from virtual server settings to cluster system management and monitoring. By default, Zeus is considered a virtual server even if it only runs one server. Like Apache, multiple virtual servers can run on the same server, and the same virtual server can be a "hard" (IP-based) or "soft" (domain-based) virtual server.

The GUI for managing servers is very easy to use and can easily generate complex configurations for multiple virtual servers. Using the GUI, the settings of different virtual servers can be cloned from each other. You can create a cluster system and implement modular configurations similar to. htaccess. The monitoring tool is very good, with dynamic monitoring for each virtual server and an independent cluster node.

Its functions are comparable to those of Apache, including easy-to-implement SSL security features and other useful features, such as bandwidth control. Zeus claims to support PHP and Java Servlets. Although easy-to-use management interfaces blur these advanced configuration features to some extent. PHP4 can be run through the API (NSAPI) supported by Zeus, or through CGI. However, many users report that this API method has stability issues.

The performance of high-end application servers is always difficult to accurately test, and tests are carried out when the load is relatively small, although it is difficult to give the server running status in case of overload, it still has some practical value. In our tests, Zeus has superior performance in terms of server throughput and response time, and has little chance of errors like Apache. Zeus has a simple GUI that is not available to other servers. According to reports, Zeus runs well in four processor Linux systems. To build a high-performance Zeus server, it is a little complicated than other servers.

IPlanet Enterprise Edition 4.1

Netscape developed a variety of WEB servers for different operating system platforms, but it only recently released its own Linux product. The popular Netscape Enterprise Server is now replaced by iPlanet Enterprise Edition, a similar product running in Linux. IPlanet is a WEB product jointly developed by SUN, Netscape, And AOL. It is designed as a high-performance, cross-platform e-commerce product. IPlanet has the same high performance as other Netscape products, and iPlanet has the Java features of SUN.

You can download and use the assessment version, or purchase the official version. Because the compression package contains the Java Runtime Environment JRE, the iPlanet compressed package is relatively large. After the compressed package is decompressed, a shell-based simple installation tool can help you install the Administration Server and Web server. All information about installation is entered at this time. Of course, you can also select the installation option, such as installing the Java component or LDAP directory, so that you can use LDAP to manage users and groups in the future.

As popular today, iPlanet allows browser management and configuration. The Administration Server provides comprehensive management and monitoring functions that allow you to reconfigure the Administration Server and Web services.