On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 12:20:18PM -0700, Cliff Wells wrote:

Hmmm, now that you mention it, I think all of those deployments may have been lighttpd. I had to hear a lot of the fallout - lighttpd was being used to generate tokens on servers that would be used for instantiating authentication credentials in a single sign-on server for admins.

So there was much gnashing of teeth whenever this would crap out. I was fortunate enough to not have this be my baby, and mostly didn't have to deal with it.

But I probably shouldn't continue to take that experience as indicitive of everything that's not Apache.

Really? I can see it being overwhelming, but it seems very understandable to me. Paired with their documentation, I don't think I've ever had a real problem getting Apache to do something I knew it could.

Well, unless you count kinda crazy, obscure mod_rewrite stuff - but of course that's a black art just because the rabbit hole goes as deep as you care to follow :).

Heh, well, for every change needed to Apache, there's 1000 people that need help configuring their POP3 client. Apache is hardly the reason the reason there's an army :).

I don't think that's such a ridiciulous claim! Consider the application server that hosts the apps that I write for my company's internal use. It hosts four or six Pylons applications and one Rails app. One of these apps handles around 1000 uses a day, one around 100, one around 10. The Rails app is an AJAX form that just pushes collected data to the browser, so is usually busy despite only having an average of 1 user a day.

The server these apps are housed on is gratuitously overpowered. Apache's flexability makes this use-case trivial.

Maybe this deployment pattern is uncommon?

Eh, I wouldn't make that claim about Apache modules. Many of them are irrelevant to me, some seem downright pointless.

I wouldn't want the lump of a chef's knife anywhere near my pocket, lest I be bleeding out all over the floor!

I'm more or less done - I think you've convinced me that Nginx is probably worth another look at some point. After all, there's nothing wrong with having another tool around to solve some problem, even if Apache is where I'd go first.

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell." --St. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram, Book II, xviii, 37