Varnish is a popular HTTP accelerator that can speed up web sites. Here is an example of how to set it up on SLC6 box in view of testing CERN Open Data portal responsiveness.

An example how to fork Unix processes and set process group in order to write a simple Apache watchdog, connecting to a web page and eventually restarting web server when the web page does not respond within a given time limit.

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
## name: watchdog_httpd
## author: tibor …