"Hard as a rock" is the code name of our latest Cherokee release: Cherokee 0.8. With this version we have reached a really important milestone along the development roadmap.

Cherokee 0.8.0 is the very best version we have released so far. As its code name points, it is actually hard as a rock. In fact, I am going to ignore the bunch of features that have been added to this release (such as X-Sendfile, Graceful restart, GeoIP rules, deflate, etcetera) and I will focus on the performance and reliability improvements.

First of all, our FastCGI support has been reworked in order to support the broken PHP implementation. After having waited a couple of years waiting for PHP to fix it, I finally got desperate and found the way to make the Cherokee FastCGI implementation deal nicely with it. The final result? Aside of having a much better PHP support, both the FastCGI and SCGI handlers are way more reliable than on the previous releases.

We have also rewritten the whole I/O caching layer. It has been a tough task to accomplished, actually. But without any sort of doubt, it has been time well spent. The new caching policy has had an impressive positive impact on the whole server performance (as soon as I get some free time, I will publish a benchmark to backup these words).

Well, we also worked on the overload management. What happens when the server reaches the overload limit? Should it do something? Should it behave differently? Should it just keep working and send an SMS to the sysop asking him to pray for it? Well, we have implemented a few politics that delay quite a lot reaching the overload limit, and in case the limit is crossed, the new overload handling mechanisms would start taking care of it. The final result is astounding.. even for me that I wrote it!

And of course, last but not least, we have done something even more difficult, something way tougher, something that we did delay for many months and that people were sighing for.. we have finally written a whole lot of new documentation!!

So, what more can I say? I am really happy about our latest release. We have made huge improvements in a short period of time. The development activity is speeding up and the community growing. I'm delighted. :-)