Apache HTTP Server Project late Tuesday announced the fifth public release of Apache 2.0. This newsest release is primarily a bug fix that includes updates to the experimental caching module, the removal of several memory leaks, and fixes for several segfaults, one of which could have been used as a denial-of-service against mod_dav.
A complete list of the changes since 2.0.40 is available at http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/CHANGES_2.0.42.
The Apache Foundation says that Apache 2.0 offers numerous enhancements, improvements, and performance boosts over the 1.3 codebase. The most visible and noteworthy addition is the capability to run Apache in a hybrid thread/process mode on any platform that supports both threads and processes. This has been shown to improve the scalability of the Apache HTTP Server in testing. Apache 2.0 also includes support for filtered I/O. This should allow modules to modify the output of other modules before being sent to the client. It also includes 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, Windows, and NetWare. Because of the many advances in Apache 2.0, it is expected to perform equally well on all supported platforms.
Apache 2.0 has been running on the apache.org Web site since December 2000 and has proven to be very reliable.
The organization considers this latest release to be the best version of Apache available and encourages users of all prior versions to upgrade.
When upgrading, however, the organization offers the following to keep in mind:
This release is not binary-compatible with previous releases, so all modules must be recompiled to work with this version. For example, a module compiled to work with 2.0.40 will not work with 2.0.42.
To use Apache with one of the threaded MPMs, users must ensure that the modules (and the libraries they depend on) are thread-safe. This information may be obtained from vendors.