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Guy Kawasaki interviews Steve Ballmer

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Interesting quotes from Steve Ballmer when asked what they would do with Yahoo’s PHP apps if Microsoft does buy Yahoo:

So I’m quite sure when all is said and done, we’ll be, you asked ‘what are you going to do with those PHP applications’, I’m sure a bunch of them will be running at high scale and in production for a long time to come. I think there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the core infrastructure, beyond what we have in Windows today, in asp.net, beyond what you see in linux & php today, and beyond time probably most of the applications on the Internet will wind up being rebuilt and redone…. but for the foreseeable future, we will be a PHP shop, if we own Yahoo as well as an ASP.NET shop

We have put a lot of attention in making sure that PHP applications run well on Windows Server … For those of you who do have PHP skills, we’re going to try to make Windows Server the best place to land PHP applications in the future as well.

You can watch Kawasaki’s interview of Steve Ballmer here.

Posted in php, microsoft | Comments Off

PHP MySQL error: Client does not support authentication protocol

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

This is a fairly common error to see on a web server setup with PHP and MySQL:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server

The most likely cause for this is that PHP is built with MySQL support, using its bundled MySQL client. The bundled MySQL client is old, version 3.23.x. MySQL introduced a new password mechanism in version 4.1 of the server. If the MySQL server is setup for the new style of passwords, clients older than 4.1 will not be able to authenticate properly.

To see if this is your problem, look at a phpinfo() on your server. Scroll down to the mysql section and check the “Client API version”. Chances are, the version displayed there is not the same as your MySQL server. For an RPM-based Linux distribution, you can fix this by installing the proper mysql-devel package and then re-compiling PHP passing “–with-mysql=/usr” to the configure script. This way, when php compiles it will use the header files for your version of MySQL.

Posted in sysadmin, php, mysql | No Comments »

Lighttpd runs circles around Apache

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Recently we did some work for a customer who has been struggling with keeping load under control. The servers run a few websites, and most of the web traffic is for a handful of sites that process lots of short web transactions in PHP against a MySQL backend database. Since each transaction is mostly unique, caching wouldn’t help.

We have heard some mixed reviews of Lighttpd and decided to test it out, since it was built mainly for speed and performance. With only about an hour’s work of building, configuring, and testing, we had a fully functional Lighttpd web server running with PHP running in FastCGI mode. FastCGI offers a way to keep PHP running in memory, independently of each web server process.

In most LAMP environments, PHP is running in Apache via an Apache module, mod_php. In this case, mod_php is loaded by each Apache child process. With all of the libraries and files required, this is not very effecient. FastCGI keeps php processes running on their own, and then php scripts are passed off to it by the web server processes when needed.

We were impressed by the results.

This first graph shows the load averages on one server over the course of several days. The green dot indicates the point when we switched one of the main websites on this server over to Lighttpd.

We just did another switch to Lighttpd on a similar type of server, where most traffic consists of short high-volume transactions. Both servers are running Apache and Lighttpd side by side, with some websites still running on Apache and the high traffic ones running on Lighttpd.

Posted in php, performance, lighttpd | 1 Comment »

Microsoft Improves PHP Performance on Windows

Friday, April 27th, 2007

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.

Posted in php, microsoft | No Comments »

PHP Acceleration through Caching

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

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.

Posted in sysadmin, php, caching, performance | No Comments »

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Archive for the ‘php’ Category

Guy Kawasaki interviews Steve Ballmer

PHP MySQL error: Client does not support authentication protocol

Lighttpd runs circles around Apache

Microsoft Improves PHP Performance on Windows

PHP Acceleration through Caching

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