“… describes the history of AOLserver — from its
inception as NaviServer to its move to open source — and offers a
comparison of AOLserver and Apache.”
“with its 17 million subscribers, America Online is fielding
28,000 hits per second across all of its various Web services and
servers. Now that’s scalability.”
“AOLserver was built in 1994 by Jim Davidson and Doug McKee, two
Unix wizards from NaviSoft, as part of an end-to-end Web publishing
system.”
“America Online later bought NaviSoft and renamed it AOLserver.
And now the source code to that server is free and available to
anyone who cares to download it…”
“With a process-pool Web server such as Apache, nothing stops
you from linking in the Oracle C libraries. Your Apache server can
then function as an Oracle client. However, in this scenario no way
exists to share a database connection among Apache server
processes. What’s the bottom line difference? A site like
http://photo.net can serve 700,000 hits per day to about 120
simultaneous users at once, with one AOLserver process holding open
eight connections to Oracle. That’s a total of nine Unix processes
(one AOLserver, eight Oracle). With Apache, providing the same
level of service from Photo.net would require 120 Apache server
process, each of which held open two connections to Oracle: 360
processes total.”