I've got a sorta old box that I use as a web server, among other things. It's got dual 450mhz Xeons and 640mb of ram, so it's a decently fast server. It's running Debian.
Anyway, up until tonight, I was running Apache 1.3.27 on it, and everything was fine. Tonight, I got bored, and so I upgraded to Apache 2.0.46 (the latest Apache 2 in Debian testing). I used the multi-threaded "worker" MPM, which the documentation assures me is "considerably faster" than the old Apache 1.3 multi-process model.
So, after some work in getting things set up again (SSL took a bit of fiddling), everything appears to be working fine. Normal static pages appear to be served just as fast as in 1.3. However, I've noticed that auto-generated directory indexes (ie indexes for directories of files that don't contain an index.html) are extremely slow. For example, if I try to go to a directory of about 300 files, it takes a good 10 seconds for the page listing the files to show up. During this time, if I run top on the server, an Apache process is maxing one cpu (that multithreaded backend in action, eh?).
This wouldn't bother me so much, except that with Apache 1.3, browsing the same directory of 300 files was extremely fast (definitely less than 1 second to generate the index). Admittedly, my server isn't brand new, but I wouldn't think it would take all that much to just generate a small amount of html. Network speed is definitely not the problem, as I'm directly connected to the server over 100mb ethernet. The directories I'm accessing are on a software RAID 0 in the server, which I've benchmarked at just over 50mb/sec reading, so I'm pretty sure that's also not the issue.
I've tried playing with the IndexOptions option. By default, it was set to "FancyIndexes VersionSort". Thinking that perhaps these were slowing things down, I turned both of these off. Even so, it still took roughly 10 seconds for the page to come up, even though now it only contained an ugly list of links with no icons.
So, I'm wondering if anybody else has had this issue, or if I'm missing something. If this is the kind of performance improvement I can expect from Apache 2, I'm sticking with 1.3!
Anyway, up until tonight, I was running Apache 1.3.27 on it, and everything was fine. Tonight, I got bored, and so I upgraded to Apache 2.0.46 (the latest Apache 2 in Debian testing). I used the multi-threaded "worker" MPM, which the documentation assures me is "considerably faster" than the old Apache 1.3 multi-process model.
So, after some work in getting things set up again (SSL took a bit of fiddling), everything appears to be working fine. Normal static pages appear to be served just as fast as in 1.3. However, I've noticed that auto-generated directory indexes (ie indexes for directories of files that don't contain an index.html) are extremely slow. For example, if I try to go to a directory of about 300 files, it takes a good 10 seconds for the page listing the files to show up. During this time, if I run top on the server, an Apache process is maxing one cpu (that multithreaded backend in action, eh?).
This wouldn't bother me so much, except that with Apache 1.3, browsing the same directory of 300 files was extremely fast (definitely less than 1 second to generate the index). Admittedly, my server isn't brand new, but I wouldn't think it would take all that much to just generate a small amount of html. Network speed is definitely not the problem, as I'm directly connected to the server over 100mb ethernet. The directories I'm accessing are on a software RAID 0 in the server, which I've benchmarked at just over 50mb/sec reading, so I'm pretty sure that's also not the issue.
I've tried playing with the IndexOptions option. By default, it was set to "FancyIndexes VersionSort". Thinking that perhaps these were slowing things down, I turned both of these off. Even so, it still took roughly 10 seconds for the page to come up, even though now it only contained an ugly list of links with no icons.
So, I'm wondering if anybody else has had this issue, or if I'm missing something. If this is the kind of performance improvement I can expect from Apache 2, I'm sticking with 1.3!
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