PUBLIC MARKS from camel with tags http & apache

A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load. We tested several free software tools that do such testing to see which work best for what kinds of sites. If you leave out the load-testing packages that are no longer maintained, non-free, or fail the installation process in some obscure way, you are left with five candidates: curl-loader, httperf, Siege, Tsung, and Apache JMeter.

Lighttpd, sometimes pronounced "Lighty", is a lightweight HTTP server that can help alleviate Apache's load by serving static content. Since Lighttpd uses less resources per request than Apache, it generally serves most static content faster than Apache. This tutorial shows how to install Lighttpd behind Apache via Apache´s proxy module.

Pound is a reverse-proxy load balancing server. It accepts requests from HTTP / HTTPS clients and distributes them to one or more Web servers. The HTTPS requests are decrypted and passed to the back-ends as plain HTTP. It will act as: a) Server load balancer b) Reverse proxy server c) Apache reverse proxy etc d) It can detects when a backend server fails or recovers, and bases its load balancing decisions on this information: if a backend server fails, it will not receive requests until it recovers e) It can decrypts https requests to http ones f) Rejects incorrect requests h) It can be used in a chroot environment (security feature)

Apache Synapse offers a wide range of connectivity, including HTTP/S, JMS, (S)FTP, SOAP, WS-ReliableMessaging and WS-Security. The project has been designed to allow administrators to support advanced functionality such as load-balancing, throttling, and failover without writing code. The new Apache Synapse 1.1 release includes many enhancements based on feedback from users, including * Apache VFS based file transport - supports File System, FTP, SFTP, JAR, ZIP, TAR, GZIP, Mime * Scheduled Task support makes it simple to run repetitive tasks * XQuery mediator - simplifies XML transformation with the XQuery standard * POJO Command mediator - allows the creation of message-independent mediation logic * DB Report and DB Lookup mediators - support message augmentation and database logging * Cache and Throttle mediators/enhancements - improve performance and manage load on existing services * Split/Clone/Aggregate mediators - support batch processing of large messages * Improved logging and tracing support With asynchronous support for HTTP and HTTPS, Apache Synapse has very high scalability under load, supporting thousands of concurrent connections even with limited threads. Combined with streaming XML support, Apache Synapse has class-leading performance results. The Apache Synapse code and binaries are available from the website at http://ws.apache.org/synapse

Apache server performance can be improved by adding additional hardware resources such as RAM, faster CPU, etc. But most of the time, the same result can be achieved by custom configuration of the server. This article looks into getting maximum performance out of Apache with the existing hardware resources, specifically on Linux systems. Of course, it is assumed that there is enough hardware resources - especially enough RAM that the server isn’t swapping frequently. First two sections look into various Compile-Time and Run-Time configuration options. The Run-Time section assumes that Apache is compiled with prefork MPM. HTTP compression and caching is discussed next. Finally, using separate servers for serving static and dynamic contents is covered. Basic knowledge of compiling and configuring Apache and Linux are assumed.