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Desktop website performance tool – Apache JMeter

Just a post ago i was wondering about testing my website's performance under heavy load and did this using online tool from LoadImpact. However, the limitation of the free service at LoadImpact.COM is that you can only run a certain amount of tests per specific website a day. Thus i got a thought  about good desktop tool, which would allow me for unlimited use.

My Twitter friend @portertech suggested on looking at Apache's JMeter. Sure enough, the tool is complex and Apache's website is full of "non-human" language describing it. Sean had also suggested on visiting FossCasts.COM to learn about the basic use of JMeter - and again thanks to him for that. Now i can run as many tests a day as i want. And FossCasts.COM - definitely worth adding to your favorites.

Tags: Apache, jmeter, Linode, load testing, nginx

Apache vs. Nginx – testing performance under heavy load

It has come to my attention, when a client of mine recently experienced unexpected traffic spike, that some industry standard solutions not always work or should i say not 100% reliable all the time. My client's server setup was an-old-school Apache 2.2/mod_php WordPress blog installation. One day they posted some "hot-buzz" celebrity photos and server had become non-responsive under the traffic flow. Of course, at that time i was unaware about high-availability setups and never imagined scenarios like this one, when you get monthly volume of visitors during the 24 hour period.

Since then i have researched a lot of places online and found, that Apache web server is not the only solution to the hosting setup problem. Many others exist and those others, event quite "beta", allow for the great tolerance for the high volume traffic.

Today i'd like to share with you my test results for my current server setup - LEMP or Linux, nginx (Engine-x), MySQL, PHP-FPM versus my old setup for this blog: LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. Both of those are on the Linode VPS (Linode 360). Before getting rid of the old server configuration i booted it one more time and ran tests using guys from LoadImpact to determine how will each of these survive under the load of 10-20-30-40-50 simulations requests.

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Tags: Apache, Hosting, Linode, nginx, performance

Deploing Grails application on Linode (Updated: Resolved)

Having strange issues while deploying my test Grails application on Tomcat. Linode box with 540 Mb RAM, Apache 2.2 - mod_proxy_ajp to Tomcat 6.0. Spike in CPU use and Tomcat being irresponsible for about 12 minutes on box restart... Then everything goes back to normal, however no trace of errors in Tomcat logs. Any ideas?

Update: Looks like i have managed to resolve it. Just upgraded application to the current build of 1.2 grails and built a war file, then deployed to tomcat via web manager. Works smooth, Linode restarts fine, no CPU spikes.

Tags: Apache, application, hangs, Linode, Photos, Tomcat

Zip a folder on the server with php

I have a spent a day today figuring how to zip a client's web site folder on a Godaddy shared Linux hosting today (they made sure users don't have SSH access on those) in order to transfer it to another server. Apparently, given the limitations of the account setup the best way was to write a php script by executing which i would zip the given folder contents, so that then i could copy just one file and unzip it on the target server.

And it can't be easier than that - if you have a folder, which contains a number of other folders and files in them the script below lets you add to the zip file quickly and easily:

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Tags: godaddy, PHP, zip