What's New in Apache Web Server 2.2?

Other

A number of smaller, but still significant, changes occurred in the 2.2 release that are worth mentioning. It’s unlikely that any of these changes, individually, would provide a compelling reason to move to 2.2 all by themselves. They are, however, useful things.

Graceful Stop

In versions prior to 2.2, the apachectl server management script provides a graceful option, which performs a graceful restart.

A graceful restart, as opposed to a regular restart, allows currently active user connections to complete before the child process (or thread) involved is killed. A regular restart, on the other hand, kills running child processes immediately and then restarts them with the new configuration settings.

Similarly, the apachectl stop command stops the server gracelessly, and any unfinished requests are unceremoniously dropped and the child processes are killed.

PCRE

Version 5.0 of the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) library is included with this version, and can be used in all directives that use regular expressions, including the *Match directives (AliasMatch, ProxyMatch, DirectoryMatch, etc.) and mod_rewrite.

Smart Filtering

mod_filter introduces the ability to dynamically add and remove filters from the filter chain, based on the value of any request or response header or environment variable.

Large File Support

The previous 2 GB file size limit has been removed, allowing you to serve DVD images or other large files from your server. Additionally, request bodies of more than ...