I was surprised to read this article from Redmond Developer News, which describes Microsoft’s partnership with Zend. Zend is probably the most influential company driving PHP development and performance. Most large PHP websites we see are running on a *nix server platform because performance on Windows has historically been abysmal. But that may now change:

“A lot of PHP development happens on Windows,” says Mark de Visser, Zend’s chief marketing officer. “However, most deployment happens on Linux. Why? Because PHP just doesn’t run very well on Windows. That was something that Microsoft didn’t like and that we saw as a problem. So, we got together with the aim of making sure that PHP had equal performance on Windows as it has on Linux and Unix.”

Zend is claiming improved Windows performance of between 200 percent and 300 percent overall with Zend Core 2.0.

It is good to see collaboration on PHP from Microsoft. But I’m sure they will still be touting their web development platforms just the same.

Inc. Magazine just ranked the Raleigh-Cary area as the 7th largest business boomtown among US large cities. Last year, they ranked the Raleigh area as 13th in business boomtowns.

I have noticed recently that Raleigh downtime is really blowing up, just based on the number of cranes I see when driving through. Research Triangle Park is still booming and we see lots of startups and VC firms feeding them.

Wilmington is the highest ranking North Carolina city to appear on the “small cities” list. At the top of the list this year is St. George, Utah, which had an 8.4 percent year-over-year job growth rate and a whopping 41.8 percent five-year growth rate.

The PHP scripting language is very flexible and gives a lot of bang for the buck. However, it is often criticized by supporters of J2EE and other web development platforms for not scaling well. Nevertheless, we see plenty of large sites running on PHP as well as popular applications like Vbulletin.

Whenever a PHP script is run, mod_php or a php binary in CGI mode parses the script and spits the output to the web server to send along to the web browser. Basically, the php code is “compiled” on the fly. This works great until we start getting traffic to our site and have to compile the same code over, and over, and over again. Imagine having to compile an everyday program like Microsoft Office each time you load it - loading is already slow enough as it is! A PHP-driven site with lots of dynamic content will easy chew up the server’s CPU resources once the traffic hits hard enough.

Some advanced PHP applications use caching at the application level, such as Wordpress which now has some caching features. But what do you do when you have a large custom-written PHP content management system based on a sport that is now getting worldwide attention and traffic? That is the situation one of our customers was in recently. We implemented eAccelerator, an open-source project that implements caching in the PHP scripting engine. Their website explains that it “increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated.”

Sure enough, eAccelerator worked as advertised. It cut the CPU usage on this particular server in half.

Realtime Black Lists (RBLs) are used by most mail servers these days in the always growing methods for controlling spam. RBLs are probably one of the oldest common methods of blocking spam, and remain in common practice because they give a lot of bang (over 50% incoming mail blocked) for the buck (free) and without too many false positives. I am updating some RBL configurations and just wanted to take a moment to review the RBLs we recommend and provide some info about them.

Spamcop
host: bl.spamcop.net
website: www.spamcop.net
how to check for a blacklisted host: http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml
about: Spamcop is one of the largest RBLs available for free use

NJABL
host: dnsbl.njabl.org
website: www.njabl.org
how to check for a blacklisted host: www.njabl.org/lookup.html
about: NJABL is another popular freely-available RBL, most listings are from clearly dynamic blocks of IP addresses and we have seen fewer false positives from NJABL than Spamcop.

Spamhaus
host: zen.spamhaus.org (combined)
website: www.spamhaus.org
how to check for a blacklisted host: www.spamhaus.org/zen/
about: Spamhaus is famous for its legal issues recently, they have been aggressively trying to prosecute spammers and deal with legal backlash from spammers as well. They maintain 3 main black lists:

• SBL: Direct UBE sources, spam services and ROKSO spammers
• XBL: Illegal 3rd party exploits, including proxies, worms and trojan exploits
• PBL: Non-MTA IP address ranges set by outbound mail policy.

The zen list combines all 3 into one big joy of blacklisting. Note that the Spamhaus blacklists are available free only for “low-traffic mail servers serving less than 100 users.”

Before implementing RBLs, make sure that you know how to whitelist around them and that your users understand that you are implementing these controls which do have the potential of blocking legitimate email. Many mail systems will allow you to implement RBLs on a per-destination-domain basis.

It looks like we missed announcing this earlier. Anyways, Tranquil Hosting is now an official RedHat hosting partner!

RedHat is the premiere Linux distributor and software company on this side of the globe. The company is headquartered just a few miles away from us in Raleigh, with 300 employees at NC State University’s Centennial Campus. RedHat’s flagship Linux distribution, RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux) is a popular choice for the web hosting industry due to its stability and proven performance handling large, dynamic website. RedHat also backs Fedora Project, a freely available Linux distro which was derived from RedHat’s original distro. Developments from Fedora are used to build the RHEL platform.

As a RedHat Hosting Partner, we have access to other RedHat products as well and can leverage RedHat software to better build solutions for our customers. Deployments with RHEL in hosting environments range from intense Web serving to large database and application servers.

On April 12, the CentOS team announced the final release of CentOS 5. This follows roughly 1 month after RedHat released RHEL 5. So far CentOS 5 is available for i386 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) PC hardware platforms although they expect to have future releases available to support PowerPC, IA64 and Sparc.

There are many updated software packages in CentOS 5, including Apache at 2.2 and MySQL at 5.0. I think the most significant part of CentOS 5 is the bundled Xen virtualization technology. We are doing some in-house testing with Xen now.