The site I benchmarked the other day is a Dokuwiki site, wiki.naptastic.com. I discovered today that it’s possible to totally disable caching for Dokuwiki. The first thing I wanted to establish was whether disabling caching in the configuration file was enough to make it ineffective, or if the cache had to be cleared out afterward. (The site seemed suspiciously responsive after I changed the configuration.) My thinking is that turning off caching would make for a more meaningful test, since each PHP process would have to do so much more than just fetching and serving a file: it now has to parse and process a bunch of stuff.
Author Archives
Downtime
I don’t think anyone is really reading this, so I’m posting this for my own amusement.
APC for the win.
I did some very basic benchmarks this weekend that seemed to indicate that APC was causing PHP not to do any work in parallel. Turns out that was wrong. PHP was suddenly only using 1 CPU because it was just that much more efficient with APC enabled. Continue reading
Useful Abstractions from Games People Play
I’m still slogging through Games People Play, by Eric Berne. It’s getting easier. The book really does not give you enough context at the outset, so you have to infer a lot, and ignore a lot. I will probably end up reading it again…
Starting from the most general, here are some useful abstractions that I’ve identified, on which I intend to capitalize: Continue reading
Understanding Apache and PHP-FPM
There are a number of guides out there on how someone has gotten their web server to work with PHP-FPM. Most of them are Nginx, but a few are Apache. While these articles will happily show you their configuration files, I haven’t found any that actually give formulas for the configuration files and why they have to be set up the way they are. The configuration for Apache’s handlers, actions, aliases, scriptaliases (if you use them), and mod_fastcgi are complicated and very much unclear. I imagine that the authors of these helpful blog posts were so happy to be done getting their configurations working that they set the files read-only and immutable, copied and pasted into their blogs, and filed it away next to the times they wrote xorg.conf and zone files from scratch.
Indeed, that’s how I wanted it to be for me. Life has other plans. Continue reading