MEETING INTRODUCTION
This month's presentation should be very interesting... a technical talk on High Performance Web Servers and alternatives.
We are also planning our next BSD meeting, with another presentation from George Neville-Neil of the The FreeBSD Project Team... tentatively something along the lines of: The FreeBSD Networking Stack (including recent work on supporting very high speed Ethernet standards, and security/packet filtering).
We are also planning a Launch Meeting for the newly released OpenSolaris (Project Indiana) Distribution.
SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS: --------------------- While RSVPs will NOT be required for this location, please RSVP if you know you are attending, or if there is a high probability that you will be attending. This will help us determine the correct amount of food and refreshments. Please RSVP by two days prior to the meeting day (the food must be ordered in advance). To REGISTER for this event, please RSVP by using the Unigroup Registration Page. This will allow us to have some automation in the registration process. Please continue to check the Unigroup web site and THIS page, for any last minute updates concerning this meeting. If you registered for this meeting, please check your email for any last minute announcements as the meeting approaches.
DIRECTIONS
Alliance for Downtown NY Conference Facility 104 Washington Street Wall Street Area Downtown, New York City
This building is located on the West side of the street. Cross Streets: Between Rector (South) and Carlisle (North) Streets.
Our meeting location is in the Lower West Corner of Downtown, North of the Battery Tunnel, South of the Downtown Hotel, North of the Resturant, East of West Street, and West of Greenwich Street. Walking West on Rector Street from Broadway, you pass Church, Greenwich then Washington Streets.
There are multiple blocks of parking lots right there, between Washington and Greenwich Streets, starting at the Battery Tunnel and extending North for a number of blocks.
Nearest mass transit stations, in order, are the '1/9' (Rector Street), 'R/W' (Rector Street) and the '4/5' (Wall Street).
PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Topic: Serving High Performance Web Sites - Where Apache Fails
For nearly a decade, Apache has been seen as the only practical choice for serving static and dynamic content. To this day, it powers the majority of all web sites. However, Apache has several limitations and forthcomings (especially in the area of performance). Nearly a decade of experience has many people believing that these limitations are inherent in serving content (An entire industry has even been created to deal with these limitations). In reality, none of these limitations exist. We'll look into some of these shortcomings, and alternative technologies which exist that do not suffer from them.
This talk will focus on technical and theoretical limitations inherent to the design of Apache. There will be at least a few benchmark results shown and explained. A big part of the talk will focus on why mod_php fails, and why FastCGI is superior.
The following alternative web servers will be discussed:
Web Resources
Apache Web Server
http://httpd.apache.org/
Lighttpd Web Server
http://www.lighttpd.net/
Nginx
http://nginx.net/
Apache Modules: FastCGI over mod_{php,perl,ruby}
http://modules.apache.org/search?id=73
http://modules.apache.org/search?id=80
TUX Web Server
http://www.stllinux.org/meeting_notes/2001/0719/tux/index.html
Joomla CMS
http://joomla.org
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Anthony Ferrara is the team lead of the Joomla! Bug Squad, a member of the Joomla! Developer work group, owner and operator of JoomlaPerformance.com, and has released open source several caching programs to increase website speed. He has quite varied background ranging from Mathematics to Emergency Medicine (and quite a bit in between).
COMPANY BIOGRAPHY
Anthony's company, Bigtrue INC, specializes in consulting and development focusing on performance (specializing in the Joomla CMS).
GIVEAWAYS
Addison-Wesley Professional/Prentice Hall PTR has been kind enough to provide us with some of their books, which we will continue to raffle off as giveaways at our meetings. Addison-Wesley also has a new end-user discount, available through their User Group program. We will be announcing the details at our next meeting!
O'Reilly has been kind enough to provide us with some of their books, which we will continue to raffle off as giveaways at our meetings.
Unigroup would like to thank both companies for the support provided by their User Group programs.
Note: The chances tend to be about 1 in 5, that any attendee of our meeting will walk away with a fairly valuable giveaway (ie. many of these books are valued between $30 and $60)!
** Thanks to our friends at Sun Microsystems, Unigroup also has Solaris 10 DVDs to raffle off.
As always, all of the books will be available for review at the start of the meeting.
FEE SCHEDULE
Yearly Membership (includes all meetings): $ 50.00
* Non-Member Single Meeting: $ 20.00
Student Yearly Membership (with ID): $ 20.00
Non-Member Student Single Meeting (with ID): $ 5.00
Cash, Check, American Express.
FOOD AND REFRESHMENTS
Complimentary Food and Refreshments will be served. This includes "wraps" such as turkey, roast beef, chicken, tuna and grilled vegetables as well as assorted salads (potato, tossed, pasta, etc), cookies, brownies, bottled water and assorted beverages.
Please join us for this meeting, you won't want to miss it!
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