It's useful to record changes that you tried and failed to do

October 2, 2019

Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I decided to try out enabling HTTP/2 on our support site. We already have HTTP/2 enabled on another internal Apache server, and both servers run Ubuntu 18.04, so I expected no problems. While I could enable everything fine and restart Apache, to my surprise I didn't get HTTP/2 on the site. Inspecting the Apache error log showed the answer:

[http2:warn] [pid 10400] AH10034: The mpm module (prefork.c) is not supported by mod_http2. The mpm determines how things are processed in your server. HTTP/2 has more demands in this regard and the currently selected mpm will just not do. This is an advisory warning. Your server will continue to work, but the HTTP/2 protocol will be inactive.

We're still using the prefork MPM on this server because when we tried to use the event MPM, we ran into a problem that is probably this Apache bug (we suspect that Ubuntu doesn't have the fix for in their 18.04 Apache version). After I found all of this out, I reverted my Apache configuration changes; we'll have to try this later, in 20.04.

We have a 'worklog' system where we record the changes we make and the work we do in email (that gets archived and so on). Since I didn't succeed here and reverted everything involved, there is no change to record, so I first was going to just move on to the next bit of work. Then I rethought that and wrote a worklog message anyway to record my failure and why. Sure, I didn't make a change, but our worklog is our knowledge base (and one way we communicate with each other, including people who are on vacation), and now it contains an explanation of why we don't and can't have HTTP/2 on those our web servers that are using prefork. If or when we come back to deal with HTTP/2 again, we'll have some additional information and context for how things are with it and us.

This is similar to documenting why you didn't do attractive things, but I think of it as somewhat separate. For us, HTTP/2 isn't particularly that sort of an attractive thing; it's just there and it might be nice to turn it on.

(At one level this issue doesn't come up too often because we don't usually fail at changes this way. At another level, perhaps it should come up more often, because we do periodically investigate things, determine that they won't work for some reason, and then quietly move on. I suspect that I wouldn't have thought to write a worklog at all if I had read up on Apache HTTP/2 beforehand and discovered that it didn't work with the prefork MPM. I was biased toward writing a worklog here because I was making an actual change (that I expected to work), which implies a worklog about it.)

Written on 02 October 2019.
« My interest in and disappointment about HTML5's new <details> element
Making changes to multiple files at once in Vim »

Page tools: View Source, Add Comment.
Search:
Login: Password:
Atom Syndication: Recent Comments.

Last modified: Wed Oct 2 20:49:49 2019
This dinky wiki is brought to you by the Insane Hackers Guild, Python sub-branch.