Varnish PHP bindings are useful for folks that need to manage Varnish from PHP. A palpable version of the extension code has finally been released. Keep in mind that the release is early beta. Nonetheless, the milestone is significant. So, what can one accomplish with the API?

Here’s a list of the most important function calls:

 stop
 start
 banUrl - Purge URL
 ban - Free form purge command
 isRunning - Boolean
 setPort - Set the admin port
 getSnapshot - Retrieve statistics snapshots
 getLine - Retrieve log entry

We are keeping a close eye on the development of the PHP Varnish extension and will update this page.

About UNIXY

UNIXY is a long-time Varnish Cache user and evangelist. They have been offering Varnish acceleration to their VPS, dedicated server, and cluster clients for more than three years. They have released the first cPanel Varnish plugin as well as spun a new startup,Fastlayer, the on-demand HTTP accelerator for the cloud.

That’s all folks!

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!

This error is not specific to Litespeed but can be encountered while building PHP with MySQL support on 64-bit systems. The fix is to tell the build that the MySQL client is indeed installed, but in a different directory, by adding the following flag to the configure line in Litespeed:

--with-libdir=lib64

The reason being the build doesn’t know at this point that it is dealing with a 64-bit OS. If adding the above switch does not work, be sure to install the MySQL client and libraries.

That’s all folks!