3. Configuration File

Global config entities

cache max=NUM

Sets the maximum number of cached responses that will be held in memory. Each cached responses holds a minimal amount of memory. More importantly, each cached response holds an open file descriptor to the file with real content and an mmap()ed region of that content. phhttpd will start pruning the cache when it notices either of these two resources coming under pressure, but has no way to easily deduce that its running low on memory. The administrator may set this value to set an upper bound on the number of responses to keep in memory.

control file=PATH

This specifies the file that will be used to talk with phhttpd_ctl.

globallog file=PATH

This specifies the file to which global messages will be logged.

mime file=PATH

This specifies the file that contains the mapping of file extensions to MIME types. It should be of the form:

text/sgml sgml sgm video/mpeg mpeg mpg mpe

timeout inactivity=NUM

Controls various network connection timeouts. 'inactivity' sets the amount of time that a connection can be idle before phhttpd will forcibly disconnect it. inactivity defaults to 0, which lets the connections idle until TCP timeouts take effect.

sendfile

Enabling this option tells phhttpd to use sendfile() rather than write()ing from an mmap()ed region. Avoiding calling mmap() will shorten the amount of time it takes to build cached responses.

Global Config Entities

md5

This enables the generation of the Content-MD5: header. This greatly increases the cost of creating a cached response for this virtual, because the MD5 function must be applied to the entire content of the response. Once the response is created, though, there is no per-request overhead.

prepop

This will cause phhttpd to traverse the entire docroot at initialization time and prepare cached responses for all the files it finds. This happens in the back ground during normal operation, so there is no dramatic increase in the time it takes for phhttpd to start serving connections.

name

This tag surrounds the string that will be used to identify the server. This string will be compared to the Host: header given in the request from the client, or will be compared to the 'host part' of the full URL if that was given. This will be used in combination with the network address and port pair to determine if a request should be served by a virtual server.

listen v4=DOT.TED.QU.AD port=PORT

This virtual server will be chosen to serve an incoming request if that request was made to the network address specified in this entity. There can be as many of these as one likes in a given virtual server, and '*' may be specified for either parameter to indicate that all addresses or ports should match.

logs

The logs section of the virtual server define the per virtual log files that should be written to during operation. See the following section on logging.