TheHippo

In my last post I wrote about some problems that I had with my virtual server that freezes under heavy load. The improvements I suggested worked really nice but the server still sometimes freezes – not often as before but it still happened. So I “googled” around and also asked at ServerFault.com.

It seems that keeping up the the apache mpm_prefork and mod_php will not be the solution anymore. Most sites suggested to use mpm_worker instead, because it uses less memory (and my problem was, that my Apache consumed all my memory). On the other hand there could be some problems with thread-safety, but I liked to give it a try. PHP will not me used as an Apache module any more. Instead we will run PHP as a FastCGI script. continue reading…

After leaving my last company I rented a small virtual server at 1und1. I took the XL vHost package which contains:

• 20 GB Raid 5 Storage
• 512 MB RAM, max 2 GB RAM
• 2 TB Traffic

At this time I thought it would be nice to install every thing by myself, so I choose a plain “Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 64 bit minimal” as operating system for my vHost. I installed Apache2, PHP5, MySQL and all the stuff I needed. It all works fine and I was really impressed by the speed of this virtual server.

Then I moved sportinleipzig.de, which I made during the time at my last company to this new server. This page does not have a very high traffic (200 unique visitors a day), but a lot of content (at least 5000 “static” pages). After 2 days the server crashed the first time, whereas crash means, that he is still alive, but does not respond to anything more then a simple ping. I restarted the server over the admin panel. Half a week later the server crashed the next time. Investigating the cause for these crashed I found out a few interesting things. continue reading…

On the last blog I wrote for was an article which described who to install eAccelerator on a Ubuntu server. As this blog entry had a lot of visits I decided to put it on this blog again:

PHP is not the fastest scripting language, that truly a fact. Except from optimizing the scripts there a few possibilities to speed everything up. One is to install a byte code optimizer and cache on your server. They cache the byte code created by the PHP parser and try to optimise it. So every time some one requests for a page on your server the script does not have to be parsed again. This brings a speedup of 120 – 250% depending on you script. There are several byte code caching program available, the one I like most is eAccelerator. Sadly eAccelerator is not available through the Ubuntu repositories so you have install them yourself. Here is a short description how to archive this!
continue reading…

Welcome to my blog!

After a while I decided to start a blog again and here is my first post.  (I think this is the third try, so we will see how long this experiment will  last.) Most of the blog entries will be about typical nerd and computer stuff like linux servers, programming, etc. I hope there will be some interesting topics for you.