I remember in the late 90s being excited to root for Apache every month when the new Netcraft survey would come out and show Apache's continued dominance over IIS and other rivals. I remember the FUD around Apache, and having to explain to people that I worked with that "a patchy" server was one that was being actively worked on and improved, and that wasn't a bad thing. I'm happy that Apache and Linux ended up being accepted and widely used -- for a while I had real fears of a dystopian future where the world ran on an IIS/Windows platform. Happy birthday Apache, I'm glad you made it.
King James Bible: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."
Shakespeare: "Within the gentle closure of my breast, / From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;"
Samuel Johnson: "the place sacred to gladness of heart, from whence all fear and anxiety were irreversibly excluded."
Jane Austen: "Elizabeth was at no loss to understand from whence this deference for her authority proceeded."
Charles Dickens: "He began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine."
John Milton: "O, how unlike the place from whence they fell?"
William Wordsworth: "As Juno was unto the Theban blood,
From whence to Thebes came griefs in multitude." (He's paraphrasing Chaucer here, but the "from whence" doesn't come from Chaucer.)
On the other hand:
PostOnce: "Whence means from where."
I think I'll go with Shakespeare, Johnson, Austen, Dickens, Milton, Wordsworth, and the Bible.
Apparently Johnson's dictionary calls from whence "a vicious mode of speech", but (see above) Johnson uses the expression himself. Ah well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Speaking of which, by the way,
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today." :-)
Well, PostOnce is correct that whence DOES mean “from where”.† However, as you point out, sticking from on the front of it is not considered improper usage. If you look, you can find plenty of illustrious sources using “whence” by itself, and plenty more (such as your list) which write “from whence”. Both forms are fine.
†OED: (1) “From what place?”. (2) “gen. and transf. From what source, origin, or cause?” (3) “From which place; from or out of which.” (3b) “as compound relative: From the place in which, from where.” (4) “gen. and transf. From which source or origin (as a product); from which cause (as a result); from which fact or circumstance (as an inference).” (5) “as n. (nonce-use.) That from which something comes or arises; place of origin; source.”
I can think of no other plausible reason for PostOnce's comment than that s/he wanted to suggest that saying "from whence" is an error.
I suppose it's barely possible that the meaning was simply "you don't have to include the 'from' when you're saying 'whence', so you could have saved yourself a bit of typing", but that seems improbable.
Apache, truly a great web server and still truly underestimated. People immediately switch to things like lighttpd or nginx when they start to feel perfomance issues coming on. Yet Apache gives you many different mpm's to choose from, worker being one of the greats (a hybrid multi process multi threaded server), or even the evented mpm which is much faster. Its all about knowing how to tune it.
Actually, anyone who has been in this industry for more than a few years knows that Apache has always had event-based 'competition'.
When I was at Linuxcare, I had the static assets moved over to a different server with Boa, since the main Apache server had a massive mod_perl memory footprint. It speeded things up and freed up a lot of memory. And this was 10 years ago...
The Apache advantage has always been that it did (a lot) more than just spit out static files quickly. Perhaps nginx or something else will take its place, but it certainly won't be merely a question of event-based servers being faster with static files. We've known that for many years.
"Even" or "especially"? I'm very inexpert on this stuff, but I thought the folklore was that Apache is appropriate when you need its configurability or when most of the time spent servicing each request is spent doing real work rather than web-server overhead, and that you want things like nginx/lighttpd/... for cases when you're serving mostly static files and care about pushing them out as fast as possible. Am I way out of date?
Last year I wrote a paper on the history of Apache for a grad course. Frankly, it's not very good, but I was able to track down some decent sources and old quotes from the original list. http://adhocidiocy.com/JSteverman_Apache.pdf <---PDF
The industry used apache a lot and it deserves kudos, but it was a poorly architected from software from the start. Aolserver was a much better server as is erlang yaws.
Aolserver had a lot of good things going for it, including its use of Tcl, but it was open sourced too late, in 1999, when Apache already had a lot more traction and uptake.
Yaws is neat, but it's kind of difficult to compare to Apache because it doesn't do as much in terms of some of the handy tools that Apache ships with, and at the same time it does more because you can write dynamic applications with it directly. Also, once again, I think it was released when Apache already was quite popular and widely used. Furthermore, the pool of people capable of hacking on C is orders of magnitude larger than that of Erlang hackers.
And when it comes down to it, Apache's way of doing things isn't that bad when you consider that it potentially has a lot of things loaded into it: those can fail occasionally without taking down the whole thing. And it's not as if Apache forks a new process for every request it receives.
It's a little amazing that we're still having threads vs. events debates 15 years on. I guess I'll have to wait a few more years for someone to invent an event-driven fast path (that loads no plugins for reliability) fronting a preforked pool of worker processes.
Come now people, remember your history the original FAQ on the Apache Server project's website claimed that "The result after combining [the NCSA httpd patches] was a patchy server..."
