Category Archives: Webservers
Building Hiphop PHP gotcha
Tonight I’ve delved into the world of Facebook’s HipHop for PHP. Unfortunately I set about this task on an RHEL 5.4 box, and it hasn’t been a walk in the park. Quite a few dependencies were out of date or didn’t exist in the repositories, libicu, boost, onig, tbb etc. Though, CMake did a good job of telling me what was wrong, so it wasn’t a huge deal, I just compiled the missing pieces from source and put them in $CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. One thing CMake didn’t pick up on however, was that the flex version shipped with current RHEL is rather outdated. Continue reading
Multiple backends with Varnish
So as of now, you can safely use one varnish instance for several front-ends, thus eliminate double-caching (memory waste, unnecessary load on back-ends), reduce network traffic, do rudimentary load balancing, ease management etc.
With the obscene amount of traffic Varnish can push without putting a fairly basic system under any load worth mentioning, you can use a single front-end to serve several nodes in most setups. Continue reading
lighttpd 2.0
While I’ve experienced some of the “oddities” they refer to, I have every bit of confidence in the developers. Even so – it’s a risky path to go down. They will most likely iron out the current shortcomings and oddities, but it’s fairly likely that a few new will be introduced during the course of rewriting.
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mod_log_forensic howto
mod_log_forensic is an often forgotten yet very handy tool in debugging webservers. It gives each request a unique ID which you can then track through your log. It first writes the request prefixed with the unique ID, then it writes … Continue reading
PHP 5.1 and 5.2 and MySQL 5.1.20+
Today I fell victim of a gotcha when custom compiling PHP 5.1.4 for a customer which runs MySQL 5.1.22. The customer in question requires the mysqli component which appears to be broken with these versions (fixed in 5.2.4 though). So … Continue reading