Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 11

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 11 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Mandriva 2009.1

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Mandriva 2009.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

This is a “dogfood” type story (see below for explanation of the term)… Open Query has ideas on resilient architecture which it teaches (training) and recommends (consulting, support) to clients and the general public (blog, conferences, user group talks). Like many other businesses, when we first started we set up our infrastructure quickly and on the cheap, and it’s grown since. That’s how things grow naturally, and is as always a trade-off between keeping your business running and developing while also improving infrastructure (business processes and technical).

Quite a few months ago we also started investing (mostly time) in the technical infrastructure, and slowly moving the various systems across to new servers and splitting things up along the way. Around the same time, the main webserver frequently became unresponsive. I’ll spare you the details, we know what the problem was and it was predictable, but since it wasn’t …

Many people know me as a nginx web server evangelist. But as (IMHO) any professional I think that it is really rewarding to know as much as possible about all the tools available on the market so every time you need to make a decision on some technical issue, you’d consider all pros and cons based on my own knowledge.

This is why when I received an email from Packt company asking if I’d like to read and review their book on Lighttpd I decided to give it a shot (I usually do not review any books because I do not always have enough time to read a book thoroughly to be able to write a review). So, here are my impressions from this book.

First, when I received the book, I was in doubt: how such a small book could cover so flexible and multi-purpose piece of software like …

Build notes and Tuning tips for Solaris

lighttpd seems to be increasingly popular, so much so that netcraft has started tracking it's use on production websites. I've spent some time building, tuning and running simple performance stress tests on lighttpd 1.4.15 on Solaris and thought I'd share what I learnt.

Building lighttpd

My build of lighttpd uses the openldap library from Cool Stack. I also built and installed pcre-7.1 in /opt/coolstack using the following script :

#!/bin/sh
INSTALLDIR=/opt/coolstack
CFLAGS="-fast -xipo -xtarget=generic"

make distclean
./configure --prefix=$INSTALLDIR CFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
make
make install
…

Build notes and Tuning tips for Solaris

lighttpd seems to be increasingly popular, so much so that netcraft has started tracking it's use on production websites. I've spent some time building, tuning and running simple performance stress tests on lighttpd 1.4.15 on Solaris and thought I'd share what I learnt.

Building lighttpd

My build of lighttpd uses the openldap library from Cool Stack. I also built and installed pcre-7.1 in /opt/coolstack using the following script :

#!/bin/sh
INSTALLDIR=/opt/coolstack
CFLAGS="-fast -xipo -xtarget=generic"

make distclean
./configure --prefix=$INSTALLDIR CFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
make
make install
…

Build notes and Tuning tips for Solaris

lighttpd seems to be increasingly popular, so much so that netcraft has started tracking it's use on production websites. I've spent some time building, tuning and running simple performance stress tests on lighttpd 1.4.15 on Solaris and thought I'd share what I learnt.

Building lighttpd

My build of lighttpd uses the openldap library from Cool Stack. I also built and installed pcre-7.1 in /opt/coolstack using the following script :

#!/bin/sh
INSTALLDIR=/opt/coolstack
CFLAGS="-fast -xipo -xtarget=generic"

make distclean
./configure --prefix=$INSTALLDIR CFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
make
make install
…

This blog turned 1 year old last month and I think all of my readers were glad to read it. I’ve never asked for help and I offered help to people who needed it. But today I’m forced to ask my readers for help because it is the first time in my long practice when I really don’t know how to solve my problem.

(more…)

lua + FastCGI

I was looking for a FastCGI backend for lua to have a asynchronous brother for mod-magnet in lighttpd.

Same as mod-magnet this embedding of lua is not meant to replace Frameworks like Rails or Spring, nor do I want to write average PHP application in it. I use this magnet to write small scripts (for this project it was 140 lines of lua) which is going to be executed at least 500 times a second.

That is a range where the setup-cost for a request matters. I don't want to load the session, nor do I want cleanup the whole environment for each request. I need a way to store connections to the database over multiple requests and I have to cache content from the database in the application.

I needed: - a byte-code cache …

lua + FastCGI

I was looking for a FastCGI backend for lua to have a asynchronous brother for mod-magnet in lighttpd.

Same as mod-magnet this embedding of lua is not meant to replace Frameworks like Rails or Spring, nor do I want to write average PHP application in it. I use this magnet to write small scripts (for this project it was 140 lines of lua) which is going to be executed at least 500 times a second.

That is a range where the setup-cost for a request matters. I don't want to load the session, nor do I want cleanup the whole environment for each request. I need a way to store connections to the database over multiple requests and I have to cache content from the database in the application.

I needed: - a byte-code cache - …