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…