The Buzz Media » Apache

How nginx and PHP-FPM Saved My WordPress Site (and Sanity)

Riyad Kalla — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:10:47 +0000

DISCLAIMER: I am not an Apache expert. I accept that it is likely possible for someone smarter than me to tweak Apache to perform comparable to nginx, but I spent 2 solid years trying to get it to perform and was never able to. I have been writing this site for almost 5 years now. [...]

Increase WordPress Performance on Apache with Worker MPM, PHP and mod_fcgid

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 May 2010 13:41:41 +0000

This is a continuation of two previous posts about Apache performance running PHP-apps like WordPress. One was on running PHP via CGI and the other was on running Apache with the thread-based “Worker” MPM instead of the default “Prefork” MPM. As mentioned in the other posts (incase you don’t want to read them… I don’t [...]

How to Enable Apache Worker MPM in CentOS / RedHat / Debian

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:52:33 +0000

I am reposting this tip because it took me a few hours to Google for it (likely using the wrong terms or combination of terms to find it) and then had a huge “duh!” moment when I saw the answer. If you are on CentOS / RedHat / Fedora and want to run Apache with [...]

Optimizing WordPress Page-Load Pauses with PHP-CGI

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:18:11 +0000

For the last 6-months I’ve been trying to deal with mysterious “page load pause” issues with WordPress on my Apache/prefork/mod_php setup. Server load was low, hardware was a 4GB 2-core machine, spent 4 months of that time tweaking MaxClients and other Apache prefork settings until I finally gave up. The behavior I was seeing is hitting [...]

Digg Rewrite Drops MySQL in Favor of NoSQL Apache Cassandra Backend

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:03:02 +0000

John Quinn from Digg recently posted on the Digg blog about Digg’s ongoing rewrite of the entire site — both front end and back end. One of the biggest performance and growth challenges that John cited for Digg was growing it’s MySQL-based relationship DB across different data centers and keeping the site performant and in [...]

Website Gzip Online Compression Test Tool

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:47:05 +0000

We’ve been tweaking with the gzip compression on the web server that hosts thebuzzmedia.com, and thebuzzmedia.com and I kept having to dig for online tools to quickly and easily test if the compression was working and by how much. (We’ve been adjusting the DeflateCompressionLevel argument to find a good balance between compressed page content and [...]

How to Check if Apache is Running Prefork or Worker

Riyad Kalla — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:38:15 +0000

For about the last week I’ve been trying to tweak the performance of a particular Apache server with varying degrees of success and failure. The biggest frustration is that I haven’t been able to find a way to determine which MPM mode Apache was running in: Prefork or Worker. Without that information I couldn’t tell [...]

Using Apache Virtual Hosts and ProxyPass Together

Riyad Kalla — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:00:39 +0000

I recently ran into a situation where I had a server with Apache on it that was already hosting a few PHP sites using VirtualHost mappings, but I now wanted to add a new Tomcat-hosted site to the same machine. In a way, what I wanted was to setup a new VirtualHost entry on Apache [...]

RedHat Pushes Up Sun Schedule, Java Fragmentation Begins

Riyad Kalla — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:15:44 +0000

If you didn’t see it, RedHat announced earlier this week that their completely Open Source Java implementation (IcedTea) had finally passed the Java Test Compatability Kit (TCK). While most folks rejoiced, I think there were a fair number of us that sighed and thought: Goddamnit, here’s the beginning of the Java fragmentation. Or if that [...]

Don't Use Plus (+) In mod_rewrite Rules

Riyad Kalla — Sat, 05 May 2007 16:11:07 +0000

You know how every once in a while you will need to get neck-deep into some super obscure issue until you finally find the answer to it, and it’s so simple or ridiculous that you want to scream at the top of your lungs and share it with everyone? Well that just happened to me [...]