Recently I’ve been using a great benchmarking took called Weighttpd, from the makers of the Lighttpd Web Server. Weighttpd is great because it is multithreaded, unlike it’s ancient and still used predecessor, Apache Benchmark (ab). I have made a short PowerShell script that uses this tool in Windows in order to run benchmarks that step through concurrency levels.
Monthly Archives: July 2012
Installing Apache 2.4 and PHP 5.4 from source
Posted by Jarrod Farncomb
on July 26, 2012
8 comments
I’ve just been through the process of installing the latest versions (as of this writing) of Apache 2.4.2 and PHP 5.4.5 from source on a new Debian 6 virtual machine for the first time.
I had some small issues along the way and thought I’d do a short post on the process I went through to get it working and resolve various errors which may help someone out. First we will install Apache, followed by PHP.
Introduction to Varnish caching
Posted by Jarrod Farncomb
on July 23, 2012
No comments
Over the last week I’ve had my first attempt at setting up a Varnish environment which is something I’ve wanted to have a go at for a long time and I thought it would be worth sharing what I’ve learnt during that process. I was quite surprised at how simple it was to get going, and by the performance provided. This will just be a brief introduction that will probably be expanded on in future Varnish related postings.
What is Varnish caching?
First off for those that do not know, Varnish is a web application accelerator that will cache content from any web server such as Apache, Nginx or IIS and serve it up much faster. Varnish is able to do this because it caches various contents meaning that less resource intensive strain is placed on the web / database server, providing a more responsive and stable server environment with higher capacity. Put simply, Varnish will speed up a website quite significantly.
Rather than having to execute PHP scripts, run MySQL queries or perform some other tasks on the server for every page view received you can have Varnish with the content cached and ready to serve out over the Internet.
Varnish can be run on different flavours of Linux and does not require it’s own server to run. You could easily set up Varnish on the same server you have the web server running on, however I was more keen to set up a test that can be expanded in the future if needed by adding either more varnish cache servers, or web servers.
In the beginning, there was a post
Posted by Jarrod Farncomb
on July 19, 2012
No comments
Greetings human, I’m Jarrod and I currently work as a Systems Administrator in Australia at a web hosting company and it’s awesome. My interests are basically all things technology, computer and Internet related.
The purpose of this blog is for me to document most of the useful stuff that I learn, and hopefully that information will be of value to someone in the future. I may also post other nonsense at random I find interesting.
Ever look for something on the Internet only to not find the answer? Or even more frustratingly is when the only information you find is from someone with the same problem saying they have fixed it years ago with no further information on how they did so.
I have this on an almost daily basis, probably something to do with technology and software changing so frequently.
In any case I’m going to use this blog to post all that random coolness and if someone else gets something out of that, then that’s great.