Ubuntu: nginx+php-cgi on a socket

Moving our PHP application into the cloud, means for us that we are leaving FreeBSD for Linux. Not the best move (IMHO), but I shall elaborate on this in a future blog post. Once we decided on Ubuntu as the Linux of our choice, I started by moving our development server to an instance on Slicehost. Point taken, Slicehost is not the cloud (as in Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Flexiscale or GoGrid) yet, but Linux on Slicehost and Linux on Amazon EC2 will be alike (or so I hope :-)) and a getting a small slice versus getting a small EC2 instance is an economical decision in the end....

July 31, 2009 · 2 min

Nginx+PHP+FastCGI: Testing your web application with bleeding edge PHP

So, every once in a while I find myself in need of trying out newer, maybe, not-yet-released features in PHP. For example, recently, I wanted to test RoundCube PHP6 — this is how I did it. On a side note, the same setup would also work for testing code with previous versions of PHP. Toolbox I used nginx and the PHP source with a little bit of ./configure and make — for kicks!...

July 5, 2009 · 2 min

PHP performance III -- Running nginx

Since part one and two were uber-successful, here’s an update on my Zend Framework PHP performance situation. I’ve also had this post sitting around since beginning of May and I figured if I don’t post it now, I never will. Disclaimer: All numbers (aka pseudo benchmarks) were not taken on a full moon and are (of course) very relative to our server hardware (e.g. DELL 1950, 8 GB RAM) and environment....

May 31, 2009 · 3 min

PHP FastCGI woes!

Those of you who run high traffic websites, have probably tried php-cgi/fcgi down the road. And most of us, have gone back to Apache. But now — actually since the middle of 2007 — there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I read a blog post by Evert Pot’s last night (Apache speed and reverse proxies). Evert noted that he tried to use Lighttpd and php-fcgi, all the infamouse tricks with spawn-fcgi....

January 26, 2009 · 2 min