Hacker News Reader

Comment by currysausage | Hacker News Reader

Always wondering: Why are there so many sites using Google HTTP servers? Are there really that many deployments of Google Sites or App Engine? Difficult to imagine. What am I missing?

View on HN

Google is in the netcraft stats since July 2007. They rebranded their Apache installations as "Google" with no version info back then (Google.com, BlogSpot.com, Youtube.com, GMail.com, etc.). It was in the media at that time and you can clearly see the drop in Apache installations in mid 2007. Don't forget Google services are available in various language domains like Google.co.uk, Google.de, etc. And Google Sites servers launched in 2007. Google App Engine initial release was in April 2008.

Blogger is probably what I was missing, certainly a lot of x.blogspot.x sites out there. Thanks!

Is it really just re-branded Apache? It seems like vanilla Apache isn't capable of the low response times that Google has. What Apache extensions/modifications does Google use?

Who said Apache isn't capable of low response times?

It seems incapable of the lowest response times, which it seems like Google has. Forking a new process to handle a request incurs overhead. In my experience nginx, which keeps several worker processes open and processes requests asynchronously is much faster.

Apache has a prefork MPM procesas model that allows it to run in the same way.

I don't know much about it, but I would think that event based mpm would be the fastest.

Depends on what you need to do. Apache has it all:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mpm.html

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/event.html

Yep that's what I meant. I believe event based would be faster than the prefork that pling suggested.

> Forking a new process to handle a request incurs overhead.

Apache does not fork a new process to handle a request. Not even in prefork mode.

Back in 2007, Apache, Lighttpd (Youtube) and custom Java server ("faster than Tomcat"). Nowadays some services probably based on nginx, others written in-house and some may still be on forked Apache.

  The Google Web Server - a custom server used only by 
  Google itself - was originally built from open-source 
  Apache code, according to a former Google employee.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/03/google_web_server_ba...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com