perfdump, for the uninitiated, is a tool for retrieving information about web server performance. It's been built into Sun and Netscape's web server software since Netscape Enterprise Server 3.0.

We're now at version 7.0, and perfdump has undergone a couple notable enhancements...

Igor Popik has written an NSAPI filter for Sun ONE Web Server 6.1 that automatically removes unnecessary whitespace from HTML pages. If your HTML looks like most sites', this filter should give a substantial performance boost to your dialup users.

Igor's made the source code and binaries freely available on his website.

Just for fun, I created an I ♥ NSAPI sticker over at cafepress.com.

New features in Sun Java System Web Server 7 offer a superset of the cookie-based user tracking functionality found in Apache's mod_usertrack module. Read on for the details...

The new variable substitution functionality in Sun Java System Web Server 7 makes mass virtual hosting much simpler. Here's how.

A while back, I mentioned how to configure 301 permanent redirects in Sun ONE Web Server 6.1. I just thought I'd mention that it's even easier in Sun Java System Web Server 7. By default, Web Server creates directives like the following in the obj.conf configuration file:

NameTrans fn="redirect" from="/path" url="http://server.example.com"

The above configures a 302 Moved Temporarily redirect. Starting in Web Server 7, you can add a status="301" parameter to indicate you want a 301 Moved Permanently redirect instead:

NameTrans fn="redirect" from="/path" url="http://server.example.com" status="301"

It's that easy. The Sun Java System Web Server 7 Technology Preview is out now, and it's free.

The Sun Java System Web Server 7 Technology Preview was released today and it's free! One of the features I worked on was support for regular expressions in redirects. In fact, Web Server 7 now offers a superset of what you can do with mod_rewrite in Apache HTTP Server...

cvr and other members of Sun's Web Server team will be at the 2006 JavaOne Conference with a Web Server 7 Technology Preview. This year's JavaOne is in San Francisco and runs May 16 - 19. There's more information in a post in cvr's blog.

Many Apache HTTP Server and Sun ONE Web Server administrators have seen "Too many open files" errors because their 3rd party plugins use stdio streams. I've written a library that can help.

crhyne notes that the most recent patch levels of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 have problems with the icons Sun ONE Web Server uses in directory listings. This appears to be an IE bug that was introduced in version 6.0.2900.2180 when Microsoft tried to fix IE's handling of malicious image files. A future Web Server service pack should include a work around.

In the meantime, you can manually replace the icons in Web Server's ns-icons directory with the following images:

• back.gif
• binary.gif
• blank.gif
• image.gif
• menu.gif
• movie.gif
• sound.gif
• text.gif
• unknown.gif

Sun will be holding a User Group meeting in New York on April 25. I'll be there. If you use any flavour of our web server -- iPlanet Web Server, Sun ONE Web Server, or Sun Java System Web Server -- I'd like you to be there, too!

Some people believe that 302 redirects can have an adverse impact on search engine rankings. Here's how to configure 301 permanent redirects instead.

Web Server normally sends Last-Modified response headers for static files but not for dynamic content like SHTML. I've written an NSAPI plugin that you can use to add Last-Modified response headers to any resource on your server.