Choosing a band name: Apache Graceful
In the ongoing crusade to find new band names inspired by concepts related to information technology here at Respond2, let’s talk about the Apache Web server.
In the mid-1990s, most folks who wanted to host a website used one piece of software to serve web pages—the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ “httpd” software. It was hard to pronounce, most people saying something like “en-see-ess-ay-aych-tee-tee-pee-dee.” Pretty annoying. In 1994, the NCSA stopped working on the software, leaving it to stagnate. This annoyed everyone much more, even us Novell NetWare administrators who stood no chance of getting to run on our servers. Fussily adjusting our togas, most of us sysadmins went back to alphabetizing our glorious, shining new collections of multi-media CD-ROMs.
Some people didn’t react that way, though. NCSA’s httpd server software was in the public domain, and in April of 1995, a loose band of guys took things into their own hands. They released a set of patches to the old httpd software to bring it up to date and add new features. The release was called “Apache” for no good reason. it was a lot easier to say, and it sounded cool, but the Web server software they produced had as much to do with the Apache nation than Danish singer Tommy Seebach’s disco version of the Shadows‘ hit “Apache.”
Some folks made jokes, saying that it was “a patchy” server. Back then, the Apache website openly admitted that there was no connection between their software and the Apache nation. These days, the current statement from the Apache foundation is that the name was chosen since Apaches were generally “…well-known for their superior skills in warfare strategy…” Sounds pretty scary to me. I just want a Web server.
All ill-advised doublespeak aside, the Apache Web server software is good— very good. It helps me sleep at night knowing that our Web server software here at Respond2 is going to make good decisions when it comes to surprise traffic spikes, looming security issues, and most other challenges. It saves us time and money, compared to other Web server solutions. The Apache effort has grown into a foundation that supports many, many other software projects.
Our Web servers are busy all the time. The screen shot at the left is a graphical representation of the traffic on one of our websites – each of those little dots represents something that’s been sent to a client from Apache. Here’s a cool movie of somebody else’s Apache server serving requests.
It would be a shame to interrupt all this—after all, requests mean site visitors, and site visitors mean product sales. One thing we do here at Respond2 when we’ve made a change to our Web servers’ configurations is called a “graceful reload”—meaning that the Web server restarts itself to implement the changes we want, but it does it with respect to our websites’ visitors. If somebody is downloading a large image or flash animation from one of our sites, the server won’t just cut off the connection and restart. Instead, it waits until the request has finished and only then restarts that little piece of itself that served that request.
We type the command “apache2ctl graceful” into our servers quite often. That initiates the graceful restart of an Apache Web server. Thus, the band name for this posting is “Apache Graceful.” Hey, it sounds stupid now, but then so did “Arcade Fire.”
