Chapter 5. Web Servers

Web servers dish out billions of web pages a day. They tell you the weather, load up your online shopping carts, and let you find long-lost high-school buddies. Web servers are the workhorses of the World Wide Web. In this chapter, we:

  • Survey the many different types of software and hardware web servers.

  • Describe how to write a simple diagnostic web server in Perl.

  • Explain how web servers process HTTP transactions, step by step.

Where it helps to make things concrete, our examples use the Apache web server and its configuration options.

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