Apache 2.0.16 Released as beta
-------------------------------

The Apache Group is proud to announce the release the sixteenth release
of Apache 2.0.  This is the first public beta of Apache 2.0.  This release
has been tested thoroughly, and has been running the apache.org web site for
the last few weeks.

Apache 2.0 offers numerous enhancements, improvements and performance
boosts over the 1.3 codebase. The most visible and noteworthy addition
is the ability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any
platform that supports both threads and processes.  This has shown to
improve the scalability of the Apache HTTPD server significantly in
our early testing, on some versions of Unix.  Apache 2.0 also includes
support for filtered I/O.  This allows modules to modify
the output of other modules before it is sent to the client.  Finally, we
have included support for IPv6 on any platform that supports IPv6.

This version of Apache is known to work on many versions of Unix, BeOS,
OS/2, and Windows.  Because of many of the advancements in Apache 2.0,
the initial release of Apache is expected to perform equally well on all 
supported platforms.

There are new snapshots of the Apache httpd source available every 6
hours from http://dev.apache.org/from-cvs/apache-2.0/ - please
download and test if you feel brave. We don't guarantee anything
except that it will take up disk space, but if you have the time and
skills, please give it a spin on your platforms.

Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since
April of 1996. The May 2000 WWW server site survey by Netcraft (see:
http://www.netcraft.co.uk/Survey/) found that more web servers were
using Apache than any other software running on more than 60% of the
Internet web servers.

For more information, please check out http://www.apache.org/httpd.html

Changes with Apache 2.0.16
 
  *) Change the default installation directory to /usr/local/apache2,
     as now defined by the "Apache" layout in config.layout. [Marc Slemko]
 
  *) OS/2: Added support for building loadable modules as OS/2 DLLs.
     [Brian Havard]
 
  *) Get MaxRequestsPerChild working with the Windows MPM.
     [Bill Stoddard]
 
  *) Make generic hooks to work, with mod_generic_hook_import/export
     experimental modules.  [Ben Laurie, Will Rowe]
 
  *) Fix segfaults for configuration file syntax errors such as
     "" followed by "" followed by "".  [Jeff Trawick]
 
  *) Cleanup the --enable-layout option of configure.  This makes
     us use a consistent location for the config.layout file, and it
     makes configure more portable.
     [jun-ichiro hagino ]
 
  *) Changes to 'ab'; fixed int overrun's, added statistics, output in
     csv/gnuplot format, rudimentary ssl support and various other tweaks
     to make results more true to what is measured. The upshot of this it
     turns out that 'ab' has often underreported the true performance of
     apache. Often by a order of magnitude :-) See talk/paper of Sander
     Temme  at April ApacheCon 2001 for details.
     [Dirk-Willem van Gulik]
 
  *) Clean up mod_cgid's temporary request pool.  Besides fixing a
     storage leak this ensures that some unnecessary pipes are closed.
     [Jeff Trawick]
 
  *) Performance: Add quick_handler hook. This hook is called at the
     very beginning of the request processing before location_walk,
     translate_name, etc.  This hook is useful for URI keyed content
     caches like Mike Abbott's Quick Shortcut Cache.
     [Bill Stoddard]
 
  *) top_module global variable renamed to ap_top_module [Perl]
 
  *) Move ap_set_last_modified to the core.  This is a potentially
     controversial change, because this is kind of HTTP specific.  However
     many protocols should be able to take advantage of this kind of
     information.  I expect that headers will need one more layer of
     indirection for multi-protocol work, but this is a small step in
     the right direction.  [Ryan Bloom]
 
  *) Enable mod_status by default.  This matches what Apache 1.3 does.
     [Ed Korthof]
 
  *) Add a ScriptSock directive to the default config file.  This is
     only enabled when mod_cgid is used.
     [Taketo Kabe ]

Complete Story

Related Stories:
Apache 2.0 released as beta(Apr 05, 2001)
Apache 2.0.15 released as an alpha(Mar 28, 2001)
Apache 2.0.14 Released as Alpha(Mar 12, 2001)
Apache 2.0 Server Up and Running(Aug 19, 2000)
Apache 2.0 Alpha 4 Released(Jun 07, 2000)
An Introduction to Apache 2.0(May 28, 2000)