> Somewhat off-topic: IMHO a high-end web server should use different
> ports/threads for publicly available plain files vs. those that require
> special attention (server-side includes, access checking). A http-import
> mechanism could distinguish between those varieties and frob hyper links
> to refer to port 1234 for fast GET operations (simply throw a file at
> the client) vs port 5678 for slow ones that require babysitting. The fast
> server personality could speed up things even more by caching open fd's,
> mmaps and file attributes for a while to avoid namei().
I've tried this (see one of the Wired sites, like www.webmonkey.com
and note the use of static.wired.com). It's a pain in the butt.
After finishing it I wished that I had tried another scheme -- stick
squid in accelerator mode in front of apache. You get the performance
benefits you'd expect, but you end up with a site maintenance nightmare.
You can automate a bunch of it, but it's still intense... and you don't
want to pay for regenerating urls on the fly. There are also clients
that simply do not understand img src= with a non-local URL. MSIE 2.0
for example.
Oh, to bring this on-topic a weensy bit: static.wired.com is a pair of
ppro 200s w/128Mb RAM happily running linux 2.0.30.
Dean