[ILUG] re: php4 + Zeus

[Donncha O Caoimh]

I started to configure php4 when I noticed a configure line checking for
AOLserver support.
Now, Kate's ranted on about how great AOLServer is for so long I just
jumped at the chance of using it along with PHP. I downloaded the server
and installed it in /usr/local/aolserver/, then configured and compiled
php4, and installed it as an AOLserver library.
Thanks to an email from Kate I managed to configure the webserver to
understand and parse .php and .php3 files so it was time to test.
Initially ab (Apache Bench, commmonly found in /usr/sbin/ab or
$APACHE_DIR/bin) reported quite a few broken connections when I tried
more than 100 concurrent connections but fiddling with nsd.tcl and
pasting stuff from their site I increased the max connections to 500,
max threads to 200 and managed to get it to answer 500 concurrent hits
from ab! Last thing I tried before I went home was increasing the number
of hits per thread to 5 and decreasing the number of threads to 100
which also served all 500 connections. The page in question printed
"hello world" and ran the phpinfo() command which prints information
about the local server.. (and lots of it!)

This compares VERY well with Apache, running even a small php script to
print hello world, the load average on the machine increased much
faster, and I didn't try 500 concurrent hits on the machine at the time.

To be fair, Apache 1.3.x was built for completeness. They never said it
was the fastest web server, but it is feature-full. Apache 2.0 can use
threads but that's still in alpha status.

 From initial testing, I'm flabbergasted at AOLserver. 
Real testing happens Monday when I bung in a bit of MySQL and put a real
application back there to stress things even more!

Donncha.


> On Fri, May 12, 2000 at 02:51:48PM +0100, Donncha O Caoimh wrote:

> > PHP 4, RC2 is out and it supports the Zeus webserver! Anyone tried Zeus
> > and know how it compares to Apache for heavy loads (small files, many,
> > many requests..)


> I haven't tried it, but AFAIK this is exactly where Zeus scores i.e. lots of
> request s for small files. Saying that, Apache 2 is reputed to be a lot
> faster than the current version. I'm working on something at the moment and
> there is some pressure to use AOLserver for performance reasons. However, I
> do not like TCL (big time !) and with the imminent of Apache 2 and Linux 2.4
> with khttpd, I'm tempted to stick to my last.