Apache is one complex piece of software, that contains many features most people are normally not using. You can do so many things with apache outside of the default configurations, and I am not going to discuss today about an external module, but about the plain old mod_log_config.

Normally most people will use for apache logging the combined LogFormat, and will not even think there will be other possible additions to that. This normally looks like:
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
and it contains most of the information we would like to see in the logs. Still there are many other information we can include here… just see below for the full list. Read the rest of this entry »

ApacheBench is one of the most common programs used to benchmark web servers.
By default apachebench will run using HTTP/1.0 requests and without compression enabled even if the tested server supports that.

For example:

ab -n 1 -v 4 “http://www.ducea.com/”
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.ducea.com (be patient)…
INFO: POST header ==
—
GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: ApacheBench/2.0.41-dev
Host: www.ducea.com
Accept: */*
—
LOG: header received:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 21:55:53 GMT
Server: Apache
Status: 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Read the rest of this entry »

Here you can find various tips & tricks for configuring and administrating Apache that I found to be useful. Once I will add a new tip, I’ll link it here so you can use this page as a main placeholder for all the tips I will post in the future. Each tip will consist in a very short description, what is it used for, where can you apply it (globally, per directory or per virtual hosts, if it can be activated without administrative privileges in .htaccess) and of course a how to implement it. I will try to keep each tip as short as possible and on a single topic so you can go directly to what you are looking for. Read the rest of this entry »