A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… oh sorry, wrong script. I’ll start over. In the dim and distant past, I wrote about my efforts to eke a little bit more performance out of the WordPress installation that this glorious website runs upon. What I’d done was fairly basic: content compression, reduced page weights, database tuning… the usual stuff.

I also described how I’d failed to get WP Super Cache working and wrote that I was investigating PHP accelerators. Yet, despite my endeavours, the website’s performance continued to be, well, pitiful. Some time later I managed to get WP Super Cache working and things improved, but were still disappointing to me.

I come from a mod_perl background and one of mod_perl’s strengths is the speed at which it can run its applications. The PHP app’s that I now find myself working with just can’t compete. I believed that I’d just have to accept that the performance goals I was aiming for weren’t achievable.

However, I was recently forced to reconsider my position when I was contracted to build a website on top of the Zend Framework — because, despite being written entirely in PHP, nursesstore.co.uk turned out to be very fast.

Suddenly, I knew that it was possible to build fast PHP applications. So I turned my attention, once again, to the speed-deficient Urban Mainframe with the fire of the true zealot burning in my eyes.

Continue Reading…

For some time now I’ve been wanting to install the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) on the Media Temple GS server upon which this website is hosted. Tantalised by the performance improvements that I’ve read about, APC became my Holy Grail. But I couldn’t get it to install on the GS server, until now.

I’ve documented the steps I used to get APC running here, in case they’re useful to anyone else.

1. Telnet or SSH onto your GS server
2. mkdir /home/#####/data/lib (where “#####” is your Media Temple account number)
3. mkdir /home/#####/data/lib/php
4. wget http://pecl.php.net/get/APC-3.0.19.tgz (at the time of writing, this is the latest stable version - adjust as necessary)
5. tar zxvf APC-3.0.19.tgz (again, adjust as necessary)
6. cd APC-3.0.19
7. phpize5
8. ./configure --enable-apc --enable-apc-mmap --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-php-config=/usr/local/php-5.2.6-1/bin/php-config
9. make clean
10. make && cp modules/*.so /home/#####/data/lib/php
11. Finally, add the following code to your php.ini file:
    extension_dir = /home/#####/data/lib/php/
extension = apc.so

That’s it. APC should now be installed and you should be able to measure a significant improvement in your PHP script performance.

Mark Nottingham tells us about Traffic Server: [via]

A long time ago, the word in high-performance proxy-caching was Inktomi’s Traffic Server. It was so fast it was referred to as being “carrier grade” and this could be said without people smirking, and it was deployed by the likes of AOL, when AOL was still how most people accessed the Internet.

A few years ago, some Yahoo! engineers found that code sitting on a shelf and decided to have a play. What they found was that it was still faster than pretty much every thing else out there. So they started using it, and built a team around it.

Fast forward to today, when the source code for Traffic Server is suddenly available as an Apache Incubator Project.

Photo Credit: Syntax Error - Folded Up Beyond All Recognition by Simon Pow

Oh the weather outside is frightful
By my Mac it’s so delightful
Sign on to my WordPress node
Hack the code, hack the code, hack the code

Er, sorry about that folks (and Mr. Brooks). So I’ve spent my weekend fooling around with WordPress plug-ins and enjoying some hard-core coding action with a hot PHP interpreter. The results of which, are a handful of new features on this site, a few little things that should make your stay here even more rewarding than it already is (I know, I know – that hardly seems possible – but I’ve managed it, superstar hacker that I am.)

Continue Reading…

Now this looks interesting. Recess is a PHP development framework based on the Model-View-Controller principle.

By building on the open source software and community, we were able to create a top-tier web site with a minimum of cost and effort. The system we ended up with is scalable to huge amounts of traffic. It runs on mostly commodity hardware making it easy to grow when the need arises.

A “must have” for web-designers everywhere.

There’s no good reason for WordPress or your site to be slow, except your own negligence. Cache everything. Monitor performance. Use the latest versions of your software. Configure it intelligently. If you take an active part in every bit of software that powers your site, soon you’ll find things fit together more smoothly than before, and the secrets of a fast server will naturally fall into place.

If you’re reaching the limits of your Apache server because you’re serving a lot of dynamic content, you can either spend thousands on new equipment or reduce bloat to increase your server capacity from 2 to 10 times. This article concentrates on important and weakly documented ways of increasing capacity without the need for additional hardware.

Fast & Security Conscious, High-Performance, High-Availability Unix Hosting on Redundant Server Arrays.