The scope of this blog entry is to give you a quick and dirty demo for start-stop-daemon together with a short use case on Gearman (all on Ubuntu). In this example, I’m using the start-stop-daemon to handle my Gearman workers through an init.d script. Gearman Gearman is a queue! But unlike for example most of the backends to Zend_Queue, Gearman provides a little more than just a message queue to send — well — messages from sender to receiver....
One of our biggest issues with CouchDB is currently the lack of compaction of our database, and by lack of, I don’t mean that CouchDB doesn’t support it, I mean that we are unable to actually run it. Compaction in a nutshell Compaction in a nutshell is pretty cool. As you know, CouchDB is not very space-efficient. For once, CouchDB saves revisions of all documents. Which means, whenever you update a document a new revision is saved....
Here’s a little HowTo on how to setup CouchDB on an AWS EC2 instance. But outside of AWS (and EC2), this setup works on any other Ubuntu server, and I suppose Debian as well. Getting started The following steps are a rough draft, or a sketch on how to get started. I suggest that you familiarize yourself with what all of these things do. If you want to skip on the reading and just get started, this should work anyway....
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....