I also did something similar 14 years ago. It was a php website that allowed you to subscribe to online newspapers and get the news sent to your Kindle, in MOBI format. It worked but it was basically calling calibre under the hood. I never made it public (and I remember a similar website existed already at that time that did not work well)
> With mod_php, every Apache process has the PHP engine embedded in it, even if PHP isn't needed, e.g., to serve a request for a .css file. When Apache gets a bunch of requests for flat files, it forks all those processes and fills up RAM with copies of the PHP engine that aren't used. That's not only wasteful, but it dramatically increases the chances that you'll run out of memory. You can limit the number of Apache children of course, but you'll see timeouts sooner when you get a traffic spike.
Yes, that is true. But most high-traffic websites will cache static files such as CSS files and images, using a reverse proxy (e.g. Varnish, a CDN, or usually both). So I don't think this is a real problem, most of the time (99.9%?), a request for a static file will not hit Apache.
I'm not saying mod_php is better for all scenarios, of course, but I think it can be ok.
It's simple and there is less overhead. Since PHP runs directly within the Apache process, there is no need for inter-process communication (no TCP, no sockets), reducing the overhead. This can lead to lower latency for individual requests.
I have a lot of respect for xz's original author, I just didn't think about the legal stuff, and that sounds quite reasonable to me now.
Personally, I find it hard to subscribe to certain theories, such as the possibility of Lasse being impersonated or involved in the incident. But that doesn't mean we should dismiss them outright at this stage. (And I'm sorry if you don't like to hear that, saying this is not comfortable for me either).
I fail to understand why this, now. For these minimal gains (compared to Brotli), servers and CDNs will need to increase memory and disk space to store the cached responses in zstd.