Scaling PHP in a High Load Environment

[savant]

http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/howto...ad+Environment

The cheapest way to get more out of your app is to utilize a byte-code compilier like eAccelerator or APC.

The goal of these packages is to reduce compile time for redundant objects / files (includes!). Out-of-the-box, PHP will compile everything across every request, which doesn't scale well at all, especially for large libraries like PEAR:B or Smarty. Using one of these options will speed up your apps considerably – which is why many PHP sites use these. It's a no-brainer.

might find interesting

[AshDigg]

Optimize your application

The first obvious thing you can do is to make sure your application isn't wasting resources. This means looking for things like:

* Redundant queries
* Bad or pointless looping
* Unnecessary database connections

Redundant queries are currently being worked on.

[acidride]

Originally Posted by savant

http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/howto...ad+Environment



might find interesting

Absolutely agree. eAccelerator or similar is important. This is a must for higher loads. I have it running on my server, and it makes a big noticeable difference even in small test loads.

[acidride]

Originally Posted by AshDigg

Redundant queries are currently being worked on.

Whereas one can always throw more webservers up in some load balancing scheme, it's a quite a bit harder to scale up the database. The optimizations you are doing are great. They're going to make a big difference down the road when one of the pligg sites hits it big! :-) or when you guys do start-up the Pligg hosting environment, this will be critically important.

[en3r0]

good article, thanks for the post!

[mbs348]

It's best to do your rewrites or local configurations in your vhost .conf file instead of in an .htaccess file. Apache has to parse the .htaccess file across requests, since it's local. It is better practice to throw your Apache configurations into the .conf file to avoid that overhead.

Is this worth noting?

[kbeeveer46]

mbs348, possibly, but most people don't have access to their apache config file so Pligg can't rely on it.

[mbs348]

Originally Posted by kbeeveer46

mbs348, possibly, but most people don't have access to their apache config file so Pligg can't rely on it.

this is true, but don't most people not even use .htaccess?

Would it be possible to include both, and users could delete the .htaccess if they could get at their .conf file?

[Simon]

I would say that if you want to tweak to those levels, then you should know enough about apache configuration to add what is required to the conf file - most sites will see no performance difference using htaccess compared to the conf file. I think it is a server configuration / performance issue, and not one for pligg to take responsibility for.

[en3r0]

i can see where it would make a difference if you run a very large website, or have a high load environment (like this article was written for), but not most pligg users. some of us also run multiple websites, so a set httpd.conf isn't always going to work for every site and software.