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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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...

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.

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