Apache under Windows Page 5

Because of the different ways that things are handled on Unix and NT, there
are some configuration directives that are specific to NT, there are some
other directives that don’t mean anything on NT, and there are some
directives for which the recommended values are different on NT, for
whatever reason.

AccessConfig and ResourceConfig

In recent versions of Apache, the old 3-file configuration system has
given way to just having one configuration file. There are files called
srm.conf and access.conf, but they contain just comments. However,
Apache still opens them up when the server starts, and looks for
directives. You can tell Apache not to do this, by setting the
AccessConfig and ResourceConfig directives to point at /dev/null on
Unix. The equivalent of this on Windows is nul. Every directory
contains an imaginary file called nul which acts like /dev/null – that
is, it’s just a bitbucket.

     AccessConfig nul
     ResourceConfig nul

nul can also be used for directives like AuthGroupFile, and anywhere

else that you might use /dev/null on Unix

AccessFileName

The default value for this directive on Unix is “.htaccess”. NT does not
care much for filenames that start with a period (.), so the recommended value
for this on NT is “htaccess”. You can get away with using .htaccess if
you like, but you might find that some editors will have trouble
reading these files, and you might have difficulty actually naming a
file that. When I tried to rename a textfile to .htaccess in Windows
Explorer, I got a dialog box that said ”You must type a filename.”

LoadModule

Not really a difference here, just a comment. On Unix systems, the
LoadModule directive allows you to load a module from an object file.
The equivalent of a shared object (so) on Unix, is a dll file on
Windows, and so these directives will look a little different on
Windows, but do exactly the same thing.

On Unix:

     LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so

On Windows:

     LoadModule status_module modules/ApacheModuleStatus.dll

MaxRequestsPerChild

What the directive means is how many requests a child should serve
before that child exits. However, since on Windows, there is only one
child, and it stays active for the length of the Apache process, it
would be silly to have the process exit after any number of requests.

The default configuration file that ships with Apache for NT has this
set to 0, which means never exit. You should leave it at that value.

If you do happen to set it to something other than 0, you may get
some unexpected behavior. In particular, due to the way that the
parent/child relationship works on Win32, and the fact that there’s
no real ”fork” on Win32, when the child does exit, it has to
completely respawn. This means that it re-reads the configuration
files. You might find that changes to the config files get applied
before you restart the server, because the server effectively
restarted itself.

You’ll also get a brief service outage as the server restarts,
rereads the configuration files, and gets going again.

MaxSpareServers, MinSpareServers

These directives refer to the number of child processes that should be
left lying around idle before they are killed. This is of course
meaningless on Windows, and so these directives have no effect on
Windows.