Combining Preforking and Prethreading - Administration

Starting with version 2 of the Apache Web Server, the Apache Project (http://httpd.apache.org) implemented a hybrid of the preforking and prethreading strategies. What the group hoped to achieve was the speed of prethreading combined with the stability of preforking.

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, a multiprocess server doesn’t crash when one of the child processes crashes, but it suffers from slower context switching. Multithreaded servers, on the other hand, do crash when one of the child threads crashes, but have faster context switching. The developers at Apache have combined the two approaches to increase the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks. Figure 5-11 shows this hybrid architecture.

Figure 5-11.  Combining preforking with prethreading

The way it works is by preforking a number of server processes. However, these processes do not handle client connections. Instead, each child process spawns a finite number of threads. The threads handle client connections. Thus, when dealing with multiple clients, the server enjoys fast context-switching. As for crashes, if a thread crashes, it takes out only other threads from the same child process instead of the whole web server. Apache also provides a setting that sets a number of requests that a process handles before it is terminated and a new process (with child threads) is created. This ensures that resource leaks in any one process will be cleaned up periodically.

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TIP  Don’t forget about multiplexing. Multiplexing can be added to a multiprocess or multithreaded server to increase scalability. Using this strategy, you can handle very large numbers of simultaneous users because each process or thread can handle more than one client. You can even combine all three and have a multiprocess, multithreaded server with multiplexing.

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Which Method Should You Choose?

Your choice of method should be made based on the requirements of the server you want to develop and the available resources in the environment in which the server will run. Multiplexing is ideal for a low-volume server to which clients will not stay connected for a long period of time. The danger with a multiplexing server is that any one client might monopolize the server’s time and cause it to stop responding to the other connected clients. In addition, a multiplexing server cannot take advantage of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) capabilities. The reason is that a multiplexing server consists of a single process and, since a process cannot be spread across multiple CPUs, the server will only ever use one CPU.

For ease of implementation, you can’t beat one process or thread per client. Processes win in stability, while threads win in context-switch time, resource use, and shared memory. Here, you must determine whether you need to coordinate the actions of clients. In a web server, for example, the clients are autonomous. So, the lack of shared memory isn’t really a concern. On the other hand, if you’re designing a multiuser enterprise application, then coordinating clients can be very important, and shared memory is essential. Of course, while using process pools can help with the context switching, when a client connects, it will still suffer from the lack of simple shared memory.

Table 5-1 summarizes the pros and cons of each method.