Apache on Justin Carmony

Ubuntu 12.04, PHP 5.4, Apache2, and ppa:ondrej/php5

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 02:06:49 +0000

Okay, wow, what a doozy. I guess this is a lesson in why you want to be careful of the PPAs you use on your Ubuntu servers.

Summary

The very popular ppa:ondrej/php5, a Personal Package Archive for Ubuntu 12.04, upgraded from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.5. This would require a newer version of Apache (v 2.4). If you upgraded Apache from 2.2 to 2.4, you would likely run into apache configuration issues.

Tracking Your Data with StatsD, Graphite, and Graphene

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 05:04:23 +0000

Update: So I spelt ~~Neil~~ Neal’s name wrong. Sorry Neal! I also added some other links to the bottom that he mentioned to me.

Its been a little over 48 hours, and StatsD, Graphite, and Graphene have already paid off major dividends. While speaking at Tek12, Neal Anders was giving a talk on Graphite which I wanted to attend, but I was speaking at the same time I was speaking on Redis so I couldn’t. Then, a week or so after the conference, someone posted a link about StatsD on twitter (I can’t remember who), so I started poking around, loved what I saw, and within an hour I had it running on a server for Dating DNA friday night (I still do some contract work for them to help keep their infrastructure running well). I quickly added about a dozen metrics to track, and went to bed.

PHP, Nginx, and Output Flushing

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:01:00 +0000

Alright, so one of the few hangups I’ve ran into with moving from Apache to Nginx was output buffering. Now, we have a few administrative tools we use to perform large operations on our library and data. These scripts can take normally 3-5 minutes to run, and they output their progress and what step they are on as they run. The way they do this is after ever step in PHP I issue the same two commands:

MySQL Sleeping Connections & PHP

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:51:48 +0000

If you want to skip to the explanation, just read below. But before then, here is a little background.

A Little Background

On January 2nd, we started to run into some serious performance problems with Dating DNA, so we began the process of going and deciding what were our problems, and how to optimize them. At the beginning, the Database was the bottleneck. It would get flooded with requests, and unable to handle them all, each query would slow down. We were using a tool called Jet Profiler (which I will post about more in detail later), but here is a graph it would output before we started out optimizations:

SVN Switch - Key to Success In Web Development

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:13:05 +0000

So lately I have been given some thought to how we use Subversion (SVN) in our web development, and features we don’t use nearly as often.

In web development, one big area where I don’t see us using a lot is branching, tagging, and merging. However, with our iPhone Apps, we use tagging and branching a lot. As I started to think why, one of the biggest things was the environment. Client development, especially with the iPhone, is double clicking on a project file for Xcode, and I’m ready to go. There is almost no hassle running trunk versus running a tag or branch. It is all the same.

XAMPP for Mac - My Frustrations & Solutions

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:15:34 +0000

These last few days I’ve been trying to get XAMPP to work on my MacBook Pro these last couple of days and it has been frustrating! It seemed I kept running into more and more problems. For those who don’t know, XAMPP is tool for developers to run a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on your machine locally. I’ve been running it on my Windows machines for years, and I have been running my production servers on Linux.

Local LAMP Developement & User Content

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:37:26 +0000

I’ve come up with a simple solution for handling user uploaded content when trying to work in a local development environment. I’ve installed XAMPP on my windows machine and at the beginning of every week I take a database snapshot and update my local database. I had a pretty smooth system going with one problem: user uploaded content.

When working with social networking sites, many times they allow for users to upload their own videos, pictures, etc. My current project wasn’t different, but I didn’t want to download 80GB of user content every week to store on my PC. I wanted a way to point my browser to the live server to get recent images, etc.