The offline alternative

A looked around for some alternatives and the first found was the MySQL Query Browser which is part of the MySQL GUI Tools. It is fast (okay, it is a installed application, but still its fast) and very comfortable for editing and creating tables and databases and also okay for just filling / editing some data inside the tables. Also nice is that is free.

MySQL Query Browser - result view

MySQL Query Browser - Table option view

In the MySQL GUI Tools there is also a so called MySQL Administrator which is nice for some statistics, setting up users and creating and restoring backups.

The online alternative

There is only one but a big con with the MySQL Query browser. I can not run it on my server, because therefore I needed to open the MySQL port and that one thing I definitely will not do.

So I searched for a while on the web and the tool which looked best for me was SQL Buddy:

• PHP-based
• makes heavy use of AJAX
• enough options for the most common operations
• size just 1 MB (instead of 11 MB for the full version of PHPMyAdmin)

SQL Buddy - result view

SQL Buddy - Table option view

For the most common tasks SQL Buddy is perfect. It is nearly as fast as installed application and easy to use.

But nobody is perfect, there are few thing I found out, that could not be archived with SQL Buddy. There is no option to create and import xx.sql.bz2 files, and currently no handling of the different storage engines, which means that you could not use foreign keys for example.

Conclusion

For you local computer you are okay with the MySQL GUI Tools and SQL Buddy, on the server I will use SQL Buddy but for the more complex tasks I will stick to PHPMyAdmin.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 06 Sep 2009 11:44:56 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Actually I think no one needs to know which PHP version is running on this machine and that there also a Subversion is running on that machine. Even the name of the operating system and the version of the Apache is not needed in most cases.

So how suppress these information?

Disable the “X-Powered-By”

• Log in to your server as root user.
• Open you php.ini file in a editor of you choice. My php.ini is located at /etc/php5/cgi/ (as I use mod_fcgid to server PHP content)
• Search and edit:

  ; Decides whether PHP may expose the fact that it is installed on the server
  ; (e.g. by adding its signature to the Web server header).  It is no security
  ; threat in any way, but it makes it possible to determine whether you use PHP
  ; on your server or not.
  expose_php = Off

  If you like you read in the official PHP documentation.

• Save and reload you Apache:

  /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Disable the “Server”-header

After searching for while I figured out that disabling the “Server”-header is not possible, without recompiling the Apache. (The Apache developers claim this as a feature.)  But you could decide between some level of information that will be provided.

• If you are not logged in, log in as root user.
• Open you Apache configuration, for me it was /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
• Search for and edit the following lines:
  1. # ServerTokens
  2. # This directive configures what you return as the Server HTTP response
  3. # Header. The default is ‘Full’ which sends information about the OS-Type
  4. # and compiled in modules.
  5. # Set to one of:  Full | OS | Minor | Minimal | Major | Prod
  6. # where Full conveys the most information, and Prod the least.
  7. #
  8. ServerTokens Full
• Replace the Full with some of the options given in the comment. Here are some examples what these options are meaning:
  

  Full	Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.6
  OS	Server: Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu)
  Minor	Server: Apache/2.2.8
  Minimal	Server: Apache/2.2
  Major	Server: Apache/2
  Prod	Server: Apache

  If you like you could also read the official documentation.

• Save and reload you Apache:

  /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Result

I had chosen Major in the last step. Now the headers look like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 06 Sep 2009 12:16:40 GMT
Server: Apache/2
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Important note: This does not improve the security of the server, because you are only hiding information. Maybe you want to read: Security through obscurity.

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.

A short step by step tutorial for switching from mpm_prefork to mpm_worker with using PHP.

• Open a terminal session as a root user.

  apt-get install apache2-mpm-worker libapache2-mod-fcgid php5-cgi

  apt will complain about a few things and will remove some of the previous installed packages. After installation make sure that mod_fcgid is enabled.

• Edit you /etc/apache2/apache2.conf or /etc/apache2/httpd.conf or any config file that will be parsed by apache and add this:
  1. AddHandler fcgid-script .php
  2. FCGIWrapper /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5 .php
  3. Options ExecCGI FollowSymlinks Indexes
• Now enter you /etc/apache2/sites-available directory and edit all the the files there. Every file should contain at least one “VirtualHost” node. Within these “VirtualHost” nodes there should be one or two “Directory” nodes. If not already there add a new line starting with “Options” and add “Indexes” and “ExecCGI” as parameters on these lines. It should be look like this one:
  1. Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews ExecCGI
  2. AllowOverride AuthConfig
  3. Order allow,deny
  4. allow from all
• Restart apache:

  /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hopefully now everything should work as before. If you had enabled eAccelerator or any other byte code cache system or if you had mode some modifications on you php.ini you now have to copy them to your “new” php.ini located at /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

A few things wont work as before, e.g. when use user authentication by PHP and not by htaccess. There are also a few issues I read about, but nothing which affect my sites.

As a result I would say spending this hours messing around with Apache and mod_fcgid was a good investment. My server now need only 90 MB Ram when idle, it was 250 MB Ram before. Even under load memory consumption stays lower as before. I hope this will be the last tweak for I longer time.

Using PHP as a FastCGI script gives you a lot of new options. So if you have a lot of time to spent or very worried about the security of you web server you could use the Apache module suexec which then could execute the script as a special user and not as the default web server user www-data. It could even use multiple user for each virtual host / directory.

Interesting links:

• http://brian.moonspot.net/2008/02/13/apache-worker-and-php/
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tune-lamp-2.html Tuning Apache and PHP
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-tune-lamp-3.html Tuning MySQL
• http://ivan.gudangbaca.com/installing_apache2_and_php5_using_mod_fcgid More detailed instruction how to install mpm_worker and PHP via mod_fcgid

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!
Everything is done from the terminal as a root user.

• Prepare you system for compiling a PHP extension:

  apt-get install build-essential php5-dev

• Choosing a folder for build process. I used “/usr/local/src/”
• Getting the sources from the eAccelerator site:

  wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.3/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.zip

• Extract and delete the archive

  unzip eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.zip && rm eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.zip

• Enter the folder

  cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.3

• Prepare as a new PHP extension and compilation

  phpize
  ./configure --enable-eaccelerator=shared

• Compile and install

  make
  make install

  The install process prints out a folder where eAccelerator has been installed. Remember or copy it, you will need this later.

• Enabling eAcceletor: Editing your “php.ini” or create a new ini file in you conf.d directory of PHP. (You can find them here: “/etc/php5/”.) Insert the following:

  zend_extension                  = "/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/eaccelerator.so"
  eaccelerator.shm_size           = "0"
  eaccelerator.cache_dir          = "/var/cache/eaccelerator"
  eaccelerator.enable             = "1"
  eaccelerator.optimizer          = "1"
  eaccelerator.check_mtime        = "1"
  eaccelerator.debug              = "0"
  eaccelerator.filter             = ""
  eaccelerator.shm_max            = "0"
  eaccelerator.shm_ttl            = "0"
  eaccelerator.shm_prune_period   = "0"
  eaccelerator.shm_only           = "0"
  eaccelerator.compress           = "1"
  eaccelerator.compress_level     = "7"
  eaccelerator.allowed_admin_path = "/var/www/eaccelerator"

  In the first line enter the path printed out during the install. In the last line you could enter a directory for the eAccelerator admin tool, if you want to use it.

• Create the cache directory:

  mkdir /var/cache/eaccelerator
  chown www-data.www-data /var/cache/eaccelerator

• Restart you Apache!

  /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

There are a lot of setting in the ini file. The whole list and the description of them could be found here:  Ini-settings.

To check if everything is working open up a page on the server that contains the “php_info();” command. There should be some thing like this:

eAccelerator

Enjoy the speed!