PHP accelerator Rumi, November 11, 2012 Even though compilation is very fast, it still has a resource and time cost, especially on high-traffic servers. We can improve our response times by more than 5x by pre-caching our compiled opcode for direct execution later. There are a few PHP accelerators which accomplish this for us: Xcache Xcache is my favourite and is the one I use in my own configurations. It works by caching the compiled PHP opcode in memory so PHP can be directly executed by the web server without expensive disk reads and processing time. Many caching schemes also use Xcache to store the results of PHP rendering so individual pages don’t need to be re-processed. APC (Alternative PHP Cache) APC is a very similar product to XCache – in fact XCache was released partially as a response to the perceived lag APC’s support for newer PHP versions. APC is essentially the standard PHP Accelerator – in fact, it will be included by default in PHP 6. As much as I like XCache, it will be hard to compete with built-in caching. MMCache Turck MMCache is one of the original PHP Accelerators. Although it is no longer in development, it is still widely used. An impressive feature of MMCache is its exporter which allows you to distribute compiled versions of your PHP applications without the source code. This is useful for those companies that feel they need to protect their program code when hosting in client environments. eAccelerator eAccelerator picked up where MMCache left off, and added a number of features to increase its usability as a content cache. Over time, the content caching features have been removed as more efficient and scalable solutions like memcache have allowed caches to be shared across web servers. Keep Optimizing One major consideration that often goes forgotten when optimizing website speeds that not all of your visitors will be using a high-speed connection; some users will be using mobile or worse connections, even for non-mobile sites. Every ounce of speed will reflect favourably on you and improve your retention rates – and ultimately get more visitors to your ‘call to action’ goals. I’ll go into more detail about bigger speed improvements we can make in a later post. Related Administrations Configurations (Linux) cachememcachephp
Delete/Purging mysql-bin (binlog) files safely January 7, 2021 The file mysql-bin.index keeps a list of all binary logs mysqld has generated and auto-rotated. The mechanisms for cleaning out the binlogs in conjunction with mysql-bin.index are: PURGE BINARY LOGS TO ‘binlogname’; PURGE BINARY LOGS BEFORE ‘datetimestamp’; These will clear all binary logs before the binlog or timestamp you just… Read More
Zimbra Exporting all mail addresses April 26, 2018April 26, 2018 Exporting all addresses (mailboxes, aliases and distribution lists) is a vital tool if you have a backup MX and only want it to accept email for valid recipients. One reason for that is to stop spammers who simply use a dictionary of common names to generate recipient email addresses which… Read More
Understanding NAT, Direct Routing & Tunneling May 3, 2016 Virtual Server via NAT The advantage of the virtual server via NAT is that real servers can run any operating system that supports TCP/IP protocol, real servers can use private Internet addresses, and only an IP address is needed for the load balancer. The disadvantage is that the scalability of… Read More