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If you want to stress test your application, the quickest and best way to do so is with siege. From the siege website: Siege is an http load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the …

This is another wonderful setup that I’ve found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup. What is Nginx? Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a fast, powerful, lightweight web server. I won’t go into the theory under-the-hood, but it’s focus is high concurrency with low memory usage. So while Apache is more robust in …

I’m deploying some new servers today, and I realized I hadn’t documented my steps on my blog. So here are a few posts detailing my setup process. What is Percona Server? Percona Server is a fork of MySQL Server. So what does that mean? For the past few years, MySQL has had some “interesting” developments …

I forget these steps all the time, so I figured I should record them here. A lot of times VMWare will auto-install the VMWare tools for you when you first setup your VM. However, many times after setting it up I’ll do updates, and updates to the kernel will be applied, knocking out the VMWare …

So today I quickly installed Redis on a server, and I wanted to keep a copy of all the commands I had used to do so. I knew there was a better way than hitting the up arrow each time to copy and paste each command in reverse order. So after some Googling, I found …

This last weekend I had a fun opportunity of restoring roughly 912 Million Rows to a database. 902 Million belonged to one single table (902,966,645 rows, to be exact). To give an idea of growth, the last time I blogged about this database we had about 40 million rows. This giant table, the “Scores” table, …

I have a couple of scripts that use the linux “mail” command to send results of cron jobs, backups, and such. The problem is I don’t want to setup more overhead than I need, nor do I want to setup non-secure services. So after asking the guys on the #uphpu channel, they recommended postfix. So …

I know I’ve been behind in my posts, so I quickly wanted to catch up with a few I’ve been meaning to post. The first is my recommendation for a service called Wormly. Now, I’ve tried to run my own Nagios servers and such, and they work, but here is why I like Wormly. First, …

These last few days have been full of quickly implementing things I’ve only read about, but hadn’t done for myself. One situation was looking at splitting web traffic across multiple servers. In our case, we had only 2% of our website that would spike and increase our load by %1000 percent (I’m not joking) for …

I always forget how to do this, so I have to look it up each time. This will make it easier the next time. It is so simple, just I always forget. First, I need to generate my ssh pub and private keys on the host server: ssh-keygen Second, I need to copy the pub …