Why I Hate the Apache Web Server 558
schon writes "Today's the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation entitled 'Why I Hate the Apache Web Server' for anyone who has expressed frustration with the various inconsistencies and nuances of the Internet's favourite config file. And yes, it includes a comparison to Sendmail."
Yahoo uses qmail, aol uses aolserver (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Whoops (Score:5, Informative)
When you click on a pdf it displays a choice of opening it in a new tab, downloading it , or viewing it as HTML (which i think uses google, but i could be wrong because i never use this option)
It really saved me.
Re:Why I hate PDFs for a text-based article (Score:3, Informative)
Really your complaint is the presentation hasn't been translated to a text based format, not about PDF files themself. The Slide show is merely meant to complement the actual talk, and wasn't meant as the main source of information.
Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh (Score:3, Informative)
There's a whole RFC here to prove you wrong:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt [ietf.org]
NeoThermic
Re:Whoops (Score:2, Informative)
To recover from that lock, all you need is to open the task manager window, and shut down that faulty acroread.exe.
Couple of comments (Score:3, Informative)
The basic auth logout: yes, people have been asking for it for years, but it's HTTP itself that doesn't provide a mechanism for logging out users, it's not Apache's fault.
The lax syntax: hell no. That sort of thing leads to security holes. If I make a typo, I'm perfectly capable of going back and fixing it, should Apache notify me immediately. But if it misinterprets a typo as meaning something I didn't want, I won't know about it until it bites me in the ass. There is nothing wrong with strict syntax for config files.
The rest are relatively sane complaints and ones I've said myself in the past. Even if they are contained in a godawful PDF.
Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh (Score:5, Informative)
a[href$=".pdf"]:after {
font-size: smaller;
content: " [pdf]";
}
I also find the following useful:
{
font-size: smaller;
content: " [new]";
}
a[href^="javascript:"]:after
{
font-size: smaller;
content: " [shite]";
}
Re:The 2G file limit... (Score:3, Informative)
One should never let the logs get larger than a few hundred MB. Consider rotating the logs, either monthly or weekly (or even more often if your logs gain size quickly).
See:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/programs/rotatel
NeoThermic
Re:Whoops (Score:2, Informative)
So (in Firefox) untick the box that opens it in a web browser.
(edit / preferences / downloads / plugins, or tools / options / downloads / plugins, and then click teh tick so that it isn't there any more).
Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh (Score:3, Informative)
Got that?
Re:Whoops (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh (Score:5, Informative)
Why I Hate The Apache Web Server
Lessons learned from IRC - Rich Bowen
Note: Opinions expressed are those of our users, as expressed on IRC. The goal of this talk is to make people aware of things which those "outside" see as problems, but which we tend to be so used to that we don't see at all. If I get carried away, feel free to throw fruit.
Why do I hate thee? Let me count the reasons.
- Fragile
- Confusing
- Missing stuff that EVERYONE asks for
Fragile
- Breaks easily. Small changes have big results
The first of these forbids Indexes. The second one permits them. Huh?
... wow, don't get me started
Disclaimer
"But that's not supported syntax!"
Then it should throw an error and break, not do something utterly unexpected. Unfortunately, several major Linux distros ship with this broken-but-almost-looks-right configuration, or variants thereof
Example 2
Vhosts
That vhost is silently ignored. Yeah. That's intuitive.
...
Discussion
"But the docs say not to do that!" Yes, I know. I wrote that line in the docs. It's still really irritating.
Another
Unlike every other Apache config setting, "Require" is case sensitive, so that's not valid valid_user would be nice too. Oh, and "Require User" and "Require Group" don't work either.
Missing (asked daily on IRC)
- Can I set a variable and use it later?
- Can I have an if/else syntax?
- Can I please reload my configuration file without restarting my server?
- How do I make ServerTokens return "Bob's Handy Dandy HTTP Server"? (Yes, this is silly, but it would sure shut a lot of people up finally.)
What else? mod_imap: how many of you have actually used that module? How many of you who are not committers know what it does? Why is it on by default? Come on folks. Netscape added client-side image maps in 1995!
And while we're on the topic mod_cern_meta: Who even knows what this module does? For the record, yes, I do. But I doubt any of you have ever used it.
CONFUSING
NumServers ServerLimit ThreadLimit ThreadsPerChild StartThreads StartServers MaxSpareThreads MinSpareServers MaxSpareServers MinSpareThreads MaxClients MaxThreadsPerChild MaxRequestsPerChild MaxRequestsPerThread ThreadStackSize
Oh sweet God make it stop
What's that directive called?
RLimitMem, RLimitCPU, RLimitNProc? I have to look these up every time. Of course, since they don't seem to do what the docs say, maybe that's not a bad thing.
Am I running out of time yet?
- Why do I have to set up two separate vhosts for http://example.com/ [example.com] and https://example.com/ [example.com] when they're the same website?
- Why are dynamic vhosts so darned hard?
- Why doesn't the default configuration file match the "security tips" document?
mod_rewrite
I probably don't need to say anything more than just "mod_rewrite". But I will: "Voodoo" and "... flexibility of sendmail". The docs practically scream "GO AWAY!"
RewriteMap
Nice, but have you ever found an actual useful example? Oh, and the example script for generating db map files doesn't actually work. (Note: Paul fixed this 2 weeks ago. See httxt2dbd)
How about this?
If I want these two aliases to work, I have to:
Re:Whoops (Score:4, Informative)
Really, the version in KDE >=3.4 is incredible.
Re:Why I hate PDFs (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The 2G file limit... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Those PDF's again... aaargh (Score:3, Informative)
I've never found a link so compelling that I would click on it without knowing something about where I was about to go and what the file type was.
You don't know the file type. The file extension is meaningless. You can follow a link to some resource named foo.html and it might be a PDF, and you can follow a link to some resource named foo.pdf and it might be an HTML document.
Same goes for the location, unless you disable client-side scripting or manually copy & paste the URIs instead of clicking on the links.
Unless you manually perform an HTTP HEAD request, you don't know the type of file you are requesting.
Re:Hey.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whoops (Score:2, Informative)
Based on my experince, 99% of time Adobe has a dialog box hidden underneath other windows that prompt you to check for update. Once you disable the freaking Adobe update checking feature, all is good.
Re:is this the internet ? (Score:3, Informative)
PDF is a document specification container. The whole point of pdf is to make your document look good and once your document looks good, to make it look the same on every machine it's displayed on. Thus ensuring that it looks good (at least according to your definition of looking good) on every screen and when printed.
If you want viewers to be able to edit your files at the expense of looking the same, or even good across platforms (and you're willing to put up with images getting strewn about willy nilly) you might as well use a word document. It's not going to look any worse than html.
*If you're making your pdfs with LaTeX then you've probably read some of the docs. A good deal of typesetting knowledge went into the design of TeX and much of it is explained in the documentation. Those docs mention something about a recomended number of characters per line for maximum comfort reading. At 10pt, you're either going to have far to many characters or you're going to have huge margins and/or double-spaced text. At which point you've negated the benefits of your 10pt text.**
**ok you could use a multicolumn format to get around that ugly fact, but then your document looks like a cheesy newsletter.
Re:Whoops (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whoops (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whoops (Score:1, Informative)
Re:is this the internet ? (Score:2, Informative)
LaTeX defaults to 10pt fonts and 1.5 inch margins, which look damn pretty. The optimal number of characters on a line is 66. Even if you scale your margins so that you have 66 characters per line at 12pts, you're going to have fewer total characters on a page than at 10pts because of vertical spacing issues. Moving up to 12pt tends to look awful. Then again, as long as I'm paid by the page instead of the word. . .
Re:Whoops (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Whoops (Score:3, Informative)
Ahhh... Serenity now.
Maybe, maybe not (Score:4, Informative)
1) Bandwidth. Whatever if being offered is large enough that the line it's on becomes highly over saturated and thus requests are processed very slowly, if at all.
2) CPU load due to dynamic content. Sites that use databases, or scripts to create their pages or something get overwhelemed because they don't have enough CPU to support all the requests.
The webserver itself isn't the problem. Either Apache or IIS can easily saturate a 100mb link with static content, even on a fairly old server.
When I worked for the school paper and we were linked, it was no problem at all. The line was 10mb, and the content was fairly small (say 300-500k total) and all static. Despite being a P2 300 the server didn't even break a sweat, load average was below 1. When the department I now work at was receantly linked for a comet simulator, it killed out webserver, despite the content being about 2k and it being a fiarly fast SPARC machine. The reason was each request required computation, so our load average was about 100.
Apache being able to survive a
Bandwidth is actually fairly common, many servers are run on small lines. I have a couple servers in my closet on my 768k up line. That is plenty for normal usage, people find the sites quite zippy. However Slashdot would easily overwhelm that bandwidth.
Re:Sigh. Just a half-witted rant, as I expected... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Whoops (Score:3, Informative)
*Very* nice (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other non-IIS webservers? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Some more (Score:3, Informative)
The spec indicates prescedence (Score:3, Informative)
As it turns out this isn't the whole truth (there can be heuristics) but what you are doing is rather dicey (read as: may give different results in different browsers or in the future). Make your charsets agree or you might cause yourself problems.
Re:General-purpose config file parsing (Score:2, Informative)
What is nice is that you have one syntax to access different kind of storage it svery powerfull.
Can't they pay someone to do it? (Score:2, Informative)
Why I love Apache (Score:2, Informative)
Virtual Hosts, Redirects, etc. are easy if you read throught he config file. Granted, it is getting a little long and should be separated into different config area files.
Re:The spec indicates prescedence (Score:3, Informative)
No it doesn't. Apache doesn't pay attention to meta element types. I don't think any server does (or ever did). Sure, that's what <meta http-equiv> was originally designed for, but think about it - do you really want your web server to have to parse each and every HTML document it serves?
These days, <meta http-equiv> is merely an unreliable indicator to a browser. If you have legacy documents, it should be fairly simple to write a script to pipe them through HTML Tidy or something, or if they are in a separate area of your website, just use an .htaccess file to send a different header for those particular documents.
Apache always ignores it. It's browser behaviour you are seeing.
General remarks (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks for all the great feedback from folks about my complaints and examples. Yes, it was more than a little tongue-in-cheek, and several of these problems have in fact already been fixed - a couple of them right there are the conference.
And, I'm not *just* complaining. I fixed the "Require User" case sensitivity thing, and I'm rewriting the mod_rewrite docs.
Re:Why I love Apache (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, you know... Always a struggle getting things to market -- especially with the political climate the way it is... Gotta worry about how people will feel about it.
The good news, though, is some chick who runs a railroad wants a metric fuck-ton of the stuff. As long as some extremist dork doesn't blow up my factories, and there's no trouble with boats delivering my copper, I should be shipping next week.
...
Man, I need to get out more...