Re: [gentoo-server] nptl in production

[Bart Braem]

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:28:55 -0700 (PDT), Kashani
<kashani-list@××××××××.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, Bart Braem wrote:
>
> > I am running a server that sometimes get's a lot of traffic and we
> > experienced some problems due to the amount of processes. We are
> > considering using nptl for our apache2 server, does that work? Is it
> > considered stable enough?
> >
> > Thanks for any advice!
>
>         Generally your module and libs support goes to hell when you turn
> on threading in Apache2. mod_php itself is considered to be thread safe,
> but adding in various things like imap support will break it because the
> imap libs aren't thread safe. Most of the people who are using threaded
> Apache2 are using it for very specific applications where they can avoid
> supporting the usual module madness that general hosting requires.
>
Okay that sounds reasonably good...

>         There are a number of performance hacks you can do such as running
> multiple webservers, one for dynamic content and one for static content.
> If you want to talk more about what you're doing and need to support I can
> try to make some suggestions.
>
Okay the situation is as follows: we have a server running that uses
PHP to dynamically generate images with GD. That goes pretty fast, but
when someone uses spiders to download our entire site it just crashes
away because of hundreds of processes.
We did manage to stop the spidering by blocking their user-agents but
if some spider identifies itself as Mozilla we're out of bussiness...
Another thing we did was installing MMCache and that solves some
problems but it's just a patch not a real soltuion...
So we consider using nptl to have less processes (the php processes
themselves are very small) and more threading.
Would that be a good idea? Do you have any other suggestions?
-- 
"May the source be with you"