Dear Apache Software Foundation, and the developers of the Apache Web server:

I would like to thank you for developing a great product. I rely on it daily to host my own sites, and a large number of people on the Internet seem to share my love of this software.

However, it appears that you seem to want to maintain a simple flaw in your logic that continues to make me crazy. I am a Web performance analyst, and at least once a week I sigh, and shake my head whenever I stoop to use Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) to visit secure sites.

I seems that in your SSL configurations, you continue to assume that ALL versions of MSIE can’t handle persistent connections under SSL/TLS.

Is this true? Is a bug initially caught in MSIE 5.x (5.0??) still valid for MSIE 6.0/7.0?

The short answer is: I don’t know.

It seems that no one in the Apache server team has bothered to go back and see if the current versions of MSIE — we are trying to track down the last three people use MSIE 5.x and help them — still share this problem.

In the meantime, can you change your SSL exclusion RegEx to something more, relevant for 2007?

Current RegEx:

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive
	ssl-unclean-shutdown
	downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

Relvant, updated REGEX:

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE [1-5].*"
	nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown
	downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0

SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE [6-9].*"
	ssl-unclean-shutdown

Please? PLEASE? It’s so easy…and would solve so many performance problems…

Please?

Thank you.

Tags: Apache, SSL, TLS, MSIE, persistent connections, keepalive, web performance

Tags: apache, Dear Apache Software Foundation, http persistence, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, persistent, ssl, Web Performance, Web server

This morning’s bounty of posts brought in two that will make you think.

First was Port80 Software’s comments on using the Cache-Control mechanism embedded in all browsers. This is interesting to read, as I have been trying to get companies to use this mechanism more intelligently for a number of years. I know that the Port80 team gets it, but it is always nice to have some outside validation of a position you have tried to evangelize for a long time.

The second was Tim O’Reilly’s post on Cal Henderson’s new book on Web scalability. While I am likely to purchase the book for a professional interest, I have one problem with Flickr’s current configuration: static.flickr.com does not use HTTP persistence, something I noted last week. This strikes me as weird.

It’s always good to see Web performance rear its head.

Technorati Tags: Tim O’reilly, Cal Henderson, Cache-Control, http, port80 software, persistent connections, Flickr

Tags: ASP, book, browser, cache-control, control, current, EAD, HTML, HTTP, http persistence, IE, IM, it, Om, One, OReilly, performance, persistent, persistent connections, PHP, posts, pr, Technorati, web, Web Performance