jfrank

I was pushing out the magnolia-railo-demo and was looking at the site performance. It was amazing by itself, sending back magnolia-railo built pages in 100ms including wire time from Portland to Dallas raw from Tomcat. On this box I have one IP though and I wanted to use a subdomain for the demo which means proxying vhosts.

When I proxied it through Apache’s httpd it took about twice as long for the page to load! (roughly 130-150ms for the base page) It seemed totally ridiculous… Now in all fairness I’m no Apache expert, but I decided to drop in nginx as a proxy on the front end and its cost as a proxy is nearly unnoticeable. I wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from hitting tomcat directly as far as speed is concerned.

I’ll have to give this a closer look for my other projects…

One slightly tricky thing is that if you need Apache’s ProxyPreserveHost in Nginx you need to use proxy_set_header Host like this:

location / {
   root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
   index  index.html index.htm;
   proxy_set_header Host $host;
   proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:80;
}

Sometimes I wonder what it will be like when apache’s gone. I will probably find myself cding into /etc/httpd/logs and cat access_log over and over… just to remember old times.

“The Internet is based upon the idea that consumers can go anywhere they want and access any content they want,” Mr. Martin said. “When they show they are blocking access to some sort of content, they have the burden to show that what they are doing is reasonable.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/technology/12comcast.html?ref=technology

This is the latest good news in the net neutrality war since Google forced the telcos hand by bidding in a wireless spectrum auction. In so doing they enabled open access rules for devices that will use it.