SearchWebManagement.com: Kicking the Windows Habit: Apache vs. IIS

“What technical advantages does Apache have over
IIS?

“Bloom: Apache’s model uses a parent and child
process. The parent does nothing. It doesn’t serve requests. Its
only job is to make sure there is one child to serve a request. So
if something happens to the one child process serving the request,
another child process is brought up as quickly as possible.
Previous to IIS 6.0 there was no multi-process model. If the Web
server died, you didn’t get it back until you started it up again.
When you are doing complex stuff like Web serving, you take the
chance that the process serving the request will fail. With IIS, if
that third party code falls, that’s it. It’s done. With Apache, we
just recreate the process. IIS 6.0 has gone to this model but it is
moving a lot of the Web server down into the kernel. I want the
kernel to be small and tight with as little code as possible. The
more you put in the kernel the greater chance your operating system
will fail. There are companies that have created Web servers for
Unix that are in the kernel, but they are optional. Apache is also
easy to extend. There is a whole community that is built up around
Apache so if you need to do something that isn’t out of the box,
chances are you can find someone who has done it and you can
download their model. And finally, security is a reality of life.
There continue to be viruses and worms that target IIS. Apache
issues security warnings occasionally, but they tend to be limited
in scope. If there is a security hole in Apache, often you can work
around it with a code fix, or you can change your configuration to
work around the problem, depending on what the problem is, of
course…”

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