[patio11]

If you are trying to run a production server using "out of the box" defaults you are going to be forever disappointed by the performance and functionality of the offerings.

I have sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of software to thousands of people which has run for years without (web-server related) incident on nginx. If I am fated to be struck down for my ignorance of nginx internals, that doom must be further down the road.

Where I do see failure is when I put the world's most popular blogging software on Apache, turn on caching and give it a gig of RAM to play with, and then watch the server get denial-of-serviced by the totally innocent actions of any ten readers attempting to access the website in a 15 second interval. Thank you, KeepAlive. Ten is not a big number on the Internet. Apache has been DOSed by my younger brother's comic book writing advice blog.

I accept that, for historical reasons, the Apache project does not optimize for being useful without being a master of arcane trivia like knowing what options the server is compiled with (!) to be able to operate a college student's blog (!!) without falling off the Internet. Much software developed these days pitched at web developers, including software which I write, has as a guiding design principle that you should be able to start using it in five minutes following simple instructions and those sensible defaults should mostly work. I think this development model is categorically better than software-by-the-experts, software-for-the-experts models.

P.S. apt-get mysql gets you a database which won't fall over if you try to host a comic book blog on it.

[saurik]

I'm sorry, but I've never tried to run a comic book blog. I have, however, had nginx taken to its knees with the default configuration on a system that could trivially handle the load it was receiving, requiring modifications to the exact same parameters one has to reconfigure after doing an apt-get install apache2-mpm-event to get good performance.

Frankly, it seems like your real issue here is that no one told you to apt-get install apache2-mpm-event instead of apache2, and if anyone would be to blame regarding that it would be Debian/Ubuntu (you will note I specifically stated "if I were a conservative Debian-based distribution using apt-get", not "the Apache project").

Again: this isn't a problem with the default configuration, this is you installing the wrong thing. From my perspective you may as well be complaining that you typed "apt-get install apache" and got Apache 1.3 (yes, I know this doesn't actually happen on Ubuntu: it simply doesn't work), when that "should" have given you Apache 2.x.