Apache – Multi Processing Modules

The Multi-Processing modules also called as MPM are the ones that are responsible for binding to network ports on a machine, accepting requests and dispatching children to handle the requests. So when ever a request comes to the Apache server the MPM modules takes the request and assigns one of its Child to the request for processing.

One important thing about this that only one MPM module can be active at any time in the HTTPD server. This is like any other Apache module but only one will be loaded at time.

The reason why MPM came into existence is to allow different ways that a server is build to handle HTTP requests within the Computing Constrains.

How does this Work?

There exists a Single Control Master process which is responsible for launching multiple Child process which takes the incoming HTTP requests for processing. Apache always tried to maintain several spare ( not-in-use ) process which will be ready for serving incoming requests. In this way client does not need to wait for child Processed to be forked before their requests can be severed.

Installing MPM

As said earlier only one MPM can be active at a time. The Installation of MPM can be done when we are building the Apache HTTPD server from source by passing an argument

--with-MPM=<Module Name>

Available MPM

Apache Server supports multiple types of MPM. Of all the available the important ones are Prefork and Worker.

By default Prefork modules is being used as the default one for Apache. There are certain major differences in selecting the MPM for Production uses

Apache Prefork  MPM - This Multi-Processing Module (MPM) implements a non-threaded, pre-forking web server that handles requests. This is appropriate for web sites that need to avoid threading for compatibility with non-thread safe libraries. This is said to be the best MPM for isolating requests so that problem with a Single request does not effect any others.

This MPM implements a hybrid multi-process multi-threaded server. By using threads to serve requests, it is able to serve a large number of requests with less system resources than a process-based server.  This also keeps spare process with threads in order to handle more load of requests

Apache Worker MPM – This MPM is best used threaded environment. This is used with Apache with modules loaded in do not have thread safety issues. However, creating processes on Linux is generally fast enough that you don't need to use worker. The worker MPM really shows off it's value on platforms that have very heavy-weight processes, such as AIX.

The Major Differences are

Prefork – uses multiple Child Process with one thread each and each process handles one connection at a time. Each request gets its own Memory-separated Process

Worker – uses multiple Child Process with many thread each. Each thread handles one Connection at a time. This is considered to be faster than the Prefork MPM.

How to find which MPM is loaded

In order to find which MPM the Current HTTPD process is using, we can run the command

[root@localhost ] httpd –V

…

Server MPM: Prefork

Configurations Files

The configuration of Prefork or Worker MPM exists in the conf.modules.d/ location in the Apache location with name mpm.conf

We can un-comment the LoadModule of the MPM we want to use.

Hope this Helps, More to come on configuring the MPM