Further Reading

Further Reading

This chapter introduces a number of new technologiesmany of which are too broad to cover in any real depth here. The following sections list resources for further investigation.

RFCs

It's always nice to get your news from the horse's mouth. Protocols used on the Internet are defined in Request for Comment (RFC) documents maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). RFC 2616 covers the header additions to HTTP 1.1 and is the authoritative source for the syntax and semantics of the various header directives. You can download RFCs from a number of places on the Web. I prefer the IETF RFC archive: www.ietf.org/rfc.html.

Compiler Caches

You can find more information about how compiler caches work in Chapter 21 and Chapter 24.

Nick Lindridge, author of the ionCube accelerator, has a nice white paper on the ionCube accelerator's internals. It is available at www.php-accelerator.co.uk/PHPA_Article.pdf.

APC source code is available in PEAR's PECL repository for PHP extensions.

The ionCube Accelerator binaries are available at www.ioncube.com.

The Zend Accelerator is available at www.zend.com.

Proxy Caches

Squid is available from www.squid-cache.org. The site also makes available many excellent resources regarding configuration and usage. A nice white paper on using Squid as an HTTP accelerator is available from ViSolve at http://squid.visolve.com/white_papers/reverseproxy.htm. Some additional resources for improving Squid's performance as a reverse proxy server are available at http://squid.sourceforge.net/rproxy.

mod_backhand is available from www.backhand.org.

The usage of mod_proxy in this chapter is very basic. You can achieve extremely versatile request handling by exploiting the integration of mod_proxy with mod_rewrite. See the Apache project Web site (http://www.apache.org) for additional details. A brief example of mod_rewrite/mod_proxy integration is shown in my presentation "Scalable Internet Architectures" from Apachecon 2002. Slides are available at http://www.omniti.com/~george/talks/LV736.ppt.

mod_accel is available at http://sysoev.ru/mod_accel. Unfortunately, most of the documentation is in Russian. An English how-to by Phillip Mak for installing both mod_accel and mod_deflate is available at http://www.aaanime.net/pmak/apache/mod_accel.

Content Compression

mod_deflate is available for Apache version 1.3.x at http://sysoev.ru/mod_deflate. This has nothing to do with the Apache 2.0 mod_deflate. Like the documentation for mod_accel, this project's documentation is almost entirely in Russian.

mod_gzip was developed by Remote Communications, but it now has a new home, at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-gzip.