It’s been over three months since our first successful Varnish plugin release. We’re riding this good vibe and are offering the Varnish plugin for DirectAdmin. Yes! http://www.unixy.net/varnish
We’ve had very positive results accelerating XenForo with Varnish (in a cluster configuration). In terms of VCL, we’ve taken a slightly different approach but it results in better caching / acceleration. We’ve allocated a small per-user cache (logged in users), which makes XenForo pages load even faster than normal conditions. This reserved cache is rather transparent to the end user so no code changes are required. In fact, the acceleration we provide requires no modification to any XF files at all.
Static files, however, are stripped out of cookies in the Varnish VCL and served from the same cache area. The performance gains are tremendous. We’ve already published a Varnish plugin for cPanel and DirectAdmin that incorporates these tweaks. Feel free to read more about it here: http://www.unixy.net/varnish
Cheers
A PHP built-in Web server has been proposed as a Request For Comment (RFC), which includes a patch to the PHP source code base. If the PHP maintainers decide to move forward with the proposal, we’d soon see an embedded Web server shipping with PHP CLI. Here’s how one would start and run the Web server:
php -S localhost:8000
Server is listening on localhost:8000… Press CTRL-C to quit.
[Thu Mar 3 05:42:06 2011] ::1:56258: /
[Thu Mar 3 05:42:06 2011] ::1:56259: /?=PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
[Thu Mar 3 05:42:06 2011] ::1:56260: /?=PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
In a way, it’s similar to how one would start the Django or web.py development server. Interesting patch…
Everyone knows that PHP opcode caching, or any kind of PHP caching for that matter, is not possible with suPHP. This is a trade off of choosing security over performance. The performance hit of running scripts under suPHP is, however, significant. It’s so significant that pages take noticeably longer to display at the browser. Also, the server load goes through the roof during traffic spikes.
The workaround we’re presenting in this post doesn’t require any compromise in terms of security. You get to keep suPHP with its security blanket but also get a tremendous performance boost from caching. The caching in question comes from Varnish Cache, the open source HTTP accelerator that runs in front Apache (or any other Web server for that matter). We’ve developed a Varnish cPanel script or plugin that allows anyone to run Varnish. The script installs, configures, manages, and integrates Varnish with cPanel without you needing to do any maintenance from the terminal.
Varnish Cache is so powerful that the performance gains surpass that of PHP opcode caching! Both internal and independent benchmarks have shown that our cPanel Varnish Plugin (and VCL) performs better than the fastest Web server in the market including Nginx, Litespeed, and Lighttpd. Read more on the results.
The following video shows how one can easily install the Varnish cPanel script:
Here’s some feedback from people that are using the script: http://www.unixy.net/secure/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=25
That’s all folks!
It tends to be difficult to prove uselessness in the unixy world because people can get quite creative with commands in shell scripts. Tools that may appear to be useless to some could be indispensable to others. And as the saying goes: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Following our six cool unixy command entry, here’s the uncool list of unixy commands. So here’s to hoping this short list is no one’s favorite!
According to Wikipedia:
Discordianism is the modern religion worshipping Eris (also known as Discordia), the Greco-Roman Goddess of Chaos.
Ok… Next.
“:” is a built-in Bash command and not a binary per se. It does nothing… But its main use remains in the dark side of computing – shell fork bombing (Caution: :(){ :|:& };:).
yes is the annoying one. It takes quite a bunch of Ctrl-C’s to kill it. But it’s there for the curious cat. And do you know what happened to that cat? yes…
Long live MS-DOS!
UNIXY is pleased to announce the beta release of the Varnish cPanel script. Read about it all here: http://www.unixy.net/varnish
Cheers!
