Early adopters of software are very valuable people, because they are the "crazy" people who actually enjoy making bug reports and boasting that they bought Betamax and not VHS. Early adopters often equate "new" with "better". There's nothing wrong with that, but you have to be careful with software. Ilia shows us that Apache 1 continues to be faster than Apache 2 for running PHP.

These figures are a good reminder that software quality works by leap-frog. Software versions alternate in quality. It's very hard to release new software versions that maintain a consistent standard of quality. For example, I think Microsoft are doing a much better job in quality control nowadays in their operating systems, but at the cost of enormous delays.

In a very common release scenario, the first release is buggy, but the project manager decides to ship it anyway due to dead-line pressures. The second release fixes the bugs. The third version has some improvements but introduce weird interactions that have to be fixed by the fourth release. And so forth.

So I do expect that Apache 2's performance running PHP will do a few jumps and eventually catch up. The question is when it stops being an early-adopter software and really becomes mainstream for the professional webmaster.

PS: The recent series of killer tidal waves hit Malaysia at noon Sunday. Not as serious as in other countries, as most parts of Malaysia are not facing the Indian ocean. Nevertheless, the whole country felt the tremors (except for me, i was dead asleep), and over 50 Malaysians have passed away, mostly in our coastal islands.