Tag: apache

About

The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to simply as Apache, is a web server notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. Apache was the first viable alternative to the Netscape Communications Corporation web server (currently known as Sun Java System Web Server), and has since evolved to rival other Unix-based web servers in terms of functionality and performance. Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server on the World Wide Web; as of March 2007 Apache served 58% of all websites.

The project's name was chosen for two reasons: out of respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their endurance and their skills in warfare, and due to the project's roots as a set of patches to the codebase of NCSA HTTPd 1.3 - making it "a patchy" server.

Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. The application is available for a wide variety of operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Novell NetWare and Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X. Released under the Apache License, Apache is free and open source software.

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_webserver

I still got sites running Apache, but all new projects are launched with Nginx. I don't need many of the features that Apache offers, and the speed gain of Nginx is just tremendous. Once you've experienced it, I doubt you'll want to go back.

Good testing will result in better code. If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. This has to do with: patience, creativity flow, will, and of course time. Constantly being interrupted breaks concentration. If there's one thing I've really learned, it's invest in a good testing environment. Rapid review of code results will pay off (I promise).
So it's OK to spend some time on learning a good IDE, and another trick to improve the speed & quality of development, is to virtualize your production pl...

I used to use Dean Edwards Javascript Packer a lot to compress my Javascript sources. Libraries of 100kB could easily shrink to 30kB and that saves load times & bandwidth. A good writeup by Julien Lecompte made me realize that there were better ways.

Recently two of my articles reached the Digg frontpage at the same day. My web server isn't state of the art and it had to handle gigantic amounts of traffic. But still it served pages to visitors swiftly thanks to a lot of optimizations. This is how you can prevent heavy traffic from killing your server.

Not everyone knows about PHP's capabilities of making SSH connections and executing remote commands, but it can be very useful. I've been using it a lot in PHP CLI applications that I run from cronjobs, but initially it was a pain to get it to work. The PHP manual on Secure Shell2 Functions is not very practicle or thorough for that matter, so I would like to share my knowledge in this how to, to make it a little less time consuming setting this up.

Everyone knows that RAM is so much faster than a hard disk. To illustrate, while a current SATA disk has peak transfer rates of 375 MB/s, current RAM can do a mind blowing 12,500 MB/s! Normally only the system itself makes use of this ultra fast storage, but we can also access this space directly. And that opens a great window of opportunity.

If you're running Squid to cache your website, you can use an htaccess file to control what kind of files should be cached, and for how long.

Let's say your site is becoming a big success and as a result it's becoming slower and slower. There are several things you do without buying additional hardware.

I ran accross php value, php flag, php admin value and php admin flag in a couple of .htaccess files, and I've used them sometimes as well by just pasting an example, but I've never really understood why there was such a great diversity. Couldn't php_setting X Y just handle it, and if not, what do the admin, value and flag attributes mean?

Readable URLs are nice. A well made website will have a logical layout, with intelligent folder and file names, and as few technical details as possible. In the most well designed sites, readers can guess at filenames with a high level of success. Clean URLs are great because they.