Zeus Web Server

Zeus Web Server is a web server for Unix and Unix-like platforms (currently Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX and Linux). Support for AIX, Tru64, and MacOS X was dropped in December 2007 [http://support.zeus.com/zws/news/2007/12/10/zws_platform_eol_dec2007] .

It is developed by Zeus Technology, a software company located in Cambridge, England. The original authors and company founders were University of Cambridge graduates Damian Reeves and Adam Twiss.

Zeus is designed to be a high-performance web server [http://www.zeus.com/products/zws/] and was commonly used by hardware vendors submitting SPECweb99 benchmarks for their hardware. [http://www.spec.org/web99/results/web99.html] The SPECweb99 benchmark was retired in 2005 and replaced by SPECweb2005. [http://spec.org/retired.html] While some SPECweb2005 submissions were made using Zeus, as of 2008 it is no longer among the top performers. [http://spec.org/web2005/results/web2005.html]

In additional to static content serving, Zeus supports dynamic content via CGI, FastCGI, Apache JServ, ISAPI, NSAPI, mod_perl, SSI and Zeus Distributed Authentication and Content (ZDAC), a proprietary FastCGI-like protocol. While Zeus mainly competes with other commercial web servers such as Sun Java System Web Server, it also claims a high degree of compatibility with the Apache web server (e.g. .htaccess and mod_rewrite), with the expectation that Apache users will migrate to Zeus as their server load increases. [http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,11536,00.asp] NSAPI and ISAPI are supported to ease migrations from Microsoft IIS and Sun Java System Web Server.

The Oxford based band, Radiohead uses it as their web server. [ [http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.radiohead.com/&verbose=1 Radiohead's website runs on a Zeus 4.3 Server] ]

References

See also

*Comparison of web servers

External links

* [http://www.zeus.com/ Zeus Technology's corporate site]
*SPECweb benchmarks comparing the performance of Zeus Web Server with Rock Web Server and Sun Java System Web Server [http://www.spec.org/benchmarks.html#web]