New Apache projects, Xen news and my learning project

Six Apache projects have gained a top level status. In my opinion, a status of Apache project and especially a top-level one is a sure indicator of high quality and innovative software. The projects are: Apache Traffic Server (web proxy), Mahout (machine learning library), Tika (content analysis toolkit), Nutch (web searching engine), Avro (data serialization system) and HBase (a NoSQL database).

Which reminds me of my to-learn list. I started with Skipfish. It quickly discovered one potential XSS flaw in the software I checked. But I was dissapointed with the number of false positives and repeated messages. Still, it was much better than other tools of the same kind I had tried before.

Nginx came next, but I only had time for a very simple test with one box and httperf . Short answer: if you're searching for a fast server for static content, search no more. Nginx without any tweaking is about 6 times faster than fine-tuned Apache 2 with prefork model. Threaded Apache 2 came closer, but still it took 30% longer to complete the test. Impressive. And that's without any caching and load balancing, where Nginx really excells.

In other news, 3 Xen projects have been accepted to Google Summer of Code: migration from memory ballooning to memory hotplug, new features for XCP web interface and XCP integration with DRBD. The last one sounds interesting.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Michael Lustfield: Nginx vs. Apache (profarius.com)
• It's lean, it's russian and it's mean - Nginx serves 7% of the worlds websites! (dccrowley.posterous.com)
• Six Apache Projects Graduate to Top-Level Status (ostatic.com)