Alternative to group directive inside VirtualHost?

I need to be able to use Group within VirtualHost,
or find an equivalent, if at all possible.

We have a number of projects with requirements that
the data be available only to the project members.
project members need to be able to read or write the
data, and they and others need to be able to view
portions of each project's data via the web.

We use Unix groups to isolate the projects; each
project's home directory has permissions of rwxrws---.
Anyone working on said project is in the Unix group
for that project. So far, so good.

Each project also has a web area. The web directory
has the same owner, group and permissions as any of the
other project data. Ideally, all of these would be handled
via one web server, using VirtualHost directives, each with
a different Group directive appropriate for that project.
But Apache httpd doesn't support that.

To date we have been using separate httpd instances. This
was mildly unwieldy, requiring modifications to the startup
scripts, separate config files, etc. As the number of projects
grows, it's not only unwieldy, but starts to consume a lot of
system resources. Project managers and team members sometimes
have to refer to multiple projects they're involved in within
a short period of time, which runs the process count for the
web servers up for a while. If we had group within VirtualHost
we might have 30 processes total, but with multiple web servers
we might have 5X20=100 processes. We're spawning processes
and we're eventually swapping. And it's only going to get
worse as we add projects.

Is there an alternative? At this point I don't even care
if it's another web server, so long as it's *nix-based
and supports the same sorts of user/group authentication
Apache does and has easy PHP integration. But obviously the
first choice would be a workaround, module, or patch for
Apache. All suggestions (other than "buy more hardware")
are welcome.

If you have any real insight into why the Apache developers
dropped this capability, I'd love to hear that as well.

Thanks,
Miles

IT Guy wrote:
> If you have any real insight into why the Apache developers
> dropped this capability, I'd love to hear that as well.

There is a new perchild MPM, but it is experimental/not under
development and is not maintained.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/perchild.html

There is also an 3rd-party project which is in beta status:
http://metux.de/mpm/en/?patpage=index
http://nibiru.borg.metux.de:7000/wiki.mpm/

--
Robert