Stuff in my sandbox...

["Robert S. Thau" <rs...@ai.mit.edu>]

My current sandbox code has a few changes in it.  Most of the changes
are actually to the default config files (merging Alexei's stuff, as
modified by Florent, with my own changes for 0.8.3 --- see below for
details).  I also made it spell "Required" correctly, tossed in drtr's
default-config-locations bugfix (good catch on his part), and did
*something* about the StartServers mess.  The sample config file
entries for these parms currently read:

  # Server-pool size regulation.  Rather than making you guess how many
  # server processes you need, Apache dynamically adapts to the load it
  # sees --- that is, it tries to maintain enough server processes to
  # handle the current load, plus a few spare servers to handle transient
  # load spikes (e.g., multiple simultaneous requests from a single
  # Netscape browser).

  # It does this by periodically checking how many servers are waiting
  # for a request.  If there are fewer than MinSpareServers, it creates
  # a new spare.  If there are more than MaxSpareServers, some of the
  # spares die off.

  # NB having too few spares can measurably hurt performance.
  # These values are probably OK for most sites ---

  MinSpareServers 5
  MaxSpareServers 10

  # Number of servers to start --- should be a reasonable ballpark figure.

  StartServers 5

MaxSpareServers can also be spelled "MaxServers" for NCSA server
back-combatibility (it's the best we can do with attempts to tailor
NCSA 1.4, given that it, too, would happily fork well beyond that
limit under sufficient demand), but that should be thoroughly
deprecated.  I *hope* that's good enough for everybody.

The change-log entries, for this and everything else, follow:

  *) Changes to server-pool management parms --- renamed current
     StartServers to MinSpareServers, created separate StartServers
     parameter which means what it says, and renamed MaxServers to
     MaxSpareServers (though the old name still works, for NCSA 1.4
     back-combatibility).  The old names were generally regarded as
     too confusing.  Also altered "docs" in sample config files.

  *) More improvements to default config files ---
     sample directives (commented out) for XBitHack, BindAddress,
     CacheNegotiatedDocs, VirtualHost; decent set of AddLanguage
     defaults, AddTypes for send-as-is and imagemap magic types, and
     improvements to samples for DirectoryIndex [Alexei Kosut]

  *) Yet more improvements to default config files --- changes to
     Alexei's sample AddLanguage directives, and sample LanguagePriority
     [ Florent Guillaume ]

  *) Set config file locations properly if not set in httpd.conf
     [ David Robinson ]

  *) Corrected spelling of "Required" in 401 error reports [Andrew Wilson]

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