Comment Re:Is httpd performance in the userspace code? (Score 1) 502
Is there something stopping Apache from being sped up?
Apache is designed to be extremely modular; every request goes through a series of hooks which call out to modules to give them a chance to do something with the request before it's passed onto the next module on the hook or the next hook on the chain. While this makes Apache incredibly flexible and very easy to extend, it also slows down the request processing.
A less flexible design can be made to perform faster, because it doesn't have to do all of the checking needed to determine how to handle the request. Fewer options == Fewer checks. For my company's web application, I wrote a custom HTTP server in Perl years ago which is still in use today. It handles our application and static files, and that's it. It performs as well as a well-designed Apache/mod_perl application, and better than a FastCGI application. That's pretty good for something that has been virtually unchanged since well before mod_perl existed.