Apache2 with worker MPM on 5.3

[Toomas Aas]

Matthew Seaman wrote:

> Prefork is the original mechanism Apache used to multiplex itself.  It
> generally works exceedingly well on Unix systems where fork(2) is fast
> and efficient, which is why it is the default.  Threaded MPMs may or
> may not be better for your particular situation, depending on:

Thanks a lot for the insight, Matthew. on Sunday I tried installing 
Apache2 with worker MPM and found out that I also had to rebuild PHP to 
make libphp4.so support threading. And then I found out that several PHP 
extensions that we need (such as php4-mysql) do not want to work with 
threading enabled. I didn't spend too much time investigating because I 
wanted to get the web server back up within reasonable time, but it 
seems that some PHP extensions just aren't considered thread safe and 
refuse to load when threaded version of PHP is in use.

So I had to put back Apache2 with prefork MPM. On the positive note, it 
has been performing better than before. Upgrading the Apache and PHP 
ports to latest may have something to do with it, as well as me finding 
and fixing a procedure which occasionally pulled /var/tmp full from 
remote server via http (aargh).