Draft of PCWeek rebuttal...

["Jason A. Dour" <ja...@bcc.louisville.edu>]

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Here's the first draft...  Let me know what y'all think...

I'd like to get the final draft finished, +1'd and sent off by
today...hopefully making it before the next edition...

Jason
# Jason A. Dour <ja...@bcc.louisville.edu>                            1101
# Programmer Analyst II; Department of Radiation Oncology; Univ. of Lou.
# Finger for URLs, PGP public key, geek code, PJ Harvey info, et cetera.

=====SNIPPITY======

It's always pleasing to see your product praised in print.  That's why the
Apache Group was at first happy with the positive press it received in
Michael Moeller's cover story, "FORT APACHE" (PCWeek, June 9, 1997)  and
Jim Rapoza's related article, "IT'S NOT EASY.  SO WHAT?"  (PCWeek, pg18,
June 9, 1997).  Our dismay arose over a statement from Moeller and the
disparate account of Apache's performance in the benchmark graph from PC
Week Labs.

Moeller's article did a good job of explaining Apache's strengths and
popularity -- until the last column.  Moeller writes, "Anyone unfamiliar
with hard-core Unix programming will not be able to get Apache running,
said users."  To this statement, we must take strong exception.  Of the
hundreds of thousands of installations of Apache, how many does Moeller
believe to be administrated by "hard-core Unix programmers?"  Apache
end-users are a diverse bunch: from computer novices, to system
administrators of varying ability and station, to Moeller's "hard-core" 
example, to everyday people who need good solid web server software. 
Moeller's "quote" from undisclosed "users" is a disappointing low-point
for an otherwise well crafted article.

As to the benchmark on page 18, we must wonder about the validity of the
claims it made.  Microsoft's IIS is shown overall to triple the
performance of two versions of Apache.  These figures are hard to believe. 
Internal testing as well as repeated user feedback indicates that Apache's
performance meets or far exceeds any of the competition.  The reported
numbers would be much different if the Apache configuration were properly
optimized to meet the benchmark's performance measure of
requests-per-second. 


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