See the design details.

We currently have a stock standard LAMP stack running all of our PHP applications – Forum / Blog / Wiki and a few other bits and pieces. All of them are connecting to a separate dB Server sitting on an internal VM with a hand full of default / out-the-box performance enhancements; ie: mod_deflate; expire headers; gzip compression etc… However; we want it to be better! How do we go about this? Enter: NGINX (eNgine-X) and Varnish! =]

So do we completely replace Apache with NGINX? No! Simply because we have over a years worth of re-write URLs and other very “Apache specific” enhancements. So this is where the fun begins ;]

NOTE: This guide assumes that you are very familiar with CENTOS and have a standard LAMP Stack (Mininum Apache Stand-Alone) already installed and fully functioning in a development / test environment. DO NOT USE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ON A PRODUCTION SERVER UNLESS TESTED IN FULL!

First off; install NGINX. – You’ll need to enable the EPEL Repos if you haven’t already, and also make sure you grab the correct version for your OS ( RHEL [4 / 5 / 6] ). If you already have the EPEL Repo’s enabled just skip the first step here.

# rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/$(uname -m)/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
# yum install nginx

Once NGINX is installed we move straight onto Varnish:

# rpm --nosignature -i http://repo.varnish-cache.org/redhat/el5/noarch/varnish-release-2.1-2.noarch.rpm
# yum install varnish

Now that that we have the base installations done we can move onto the configuration of Apache, Varnish and NGINX in a nice transparent manner.

Apache Configuration:

To start off with; you’ll need to change your Apache configuration a little.
First you will need to disable the port listener in the “httpd.conf” – default /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

Find:

Listen 80

Replace with:

# Listen 80

Now open up your virtual host config file and replace all the virtualhost ports to 8080 and also change any named virtual host directives to 8080:

Find:

NameVirtualHost yourhost:80
 
.....

Replace with:

NameVirtualHost *:8080
 
.....

Save and close up the virtual hosts file; you’re done with it for now.

NGINX Configuration:

We need to make some adjustments to out NGINX configs now. In your nginx.conf – default /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.

Make sure that the default server listening port is set to 80.

    #
    # The default server
    #
    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  _;

That’s it, you’re done. You don’t need to change anything else in here; now we move onto the NGINX Virtual Host file – default /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf

If there is anything in this file; I’d recommend either commenting it all out or creating a new one completely to avoid any conflicts. Remember; we’re trying to achieve setting up NGINX as a proxy pass through to Apache / Varnish, not set it up as a stand-alone server!

The Virtual Host Config for each of your proxy domains would look something like this:

server {
 listen 80; # Default listen port
 server_name yourdomain.com; # Your domain alias - can be subdomain
 access_log /var/log/nginx/yourdomain-access.log;
 gzip on; # Turn on gZip
 gzip_disable msie6;
 gzip_static on;
 gzip_comp_level 9;
 gzip_proxied any;
 gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
 
 location / {
  proxy_redirect off; # Do not redirect this proxy - It needs to be pass-through
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header X-Server-Address $server_addr;
  proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie;
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:6081; # Pass all traffic through to Varnish
 }
}

You can add as many virtual host entries as you like; all the domains that you want proxied through to Varnish / Apache must point to the same proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:6081. Save and close; we’re done with the virtual host configs for now.

Varnish Configuration:

Moving onto the last step; well, almost the last step: Setting up Varnish. We need to edit the default.vcl; default /etc/varnish/default.vcl

All you need to do is change the default host and port entries:

backend default {
  .host = "localhost";
  .port = "8080"; # This need to be the same as the Apache vHost port listener!
}

Save and close; we’re done! Now we just start everything up and run one or two tests to make sure it’s all working as planned =]

Startup all the services:

[root@unicore]# /etc/init.d/httpd restart && /etc/init.d/nginx restart && /etc/init.d/varnish restart
Stopping httpd:                                  [  OK  ]
Starting httpd:                                  [  OK  ]
Stopping nginx:                                  [  FAILED  ]
Starting nginx:                                  [  OK  ]
Stopping varnish HTTP accelerator:               [  FAILED  ]
Starting varnish HTTP accelerator:               [  OK  ]
[root@unicore]#

We use ‘restart’ to initialise all the services just in-case any of them are already running.

Now just to test that Varnish and NGINX are running as intended along with Apache.

We’ve start off by checking that all traffic is actually being directed through NGINX:

[root@unicore]# ab -c 50 -n 100 http://yourdomain.com/index.php
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
 
Benchmarking local.wordpress (be patient).....done
 
Server Software:        nginx/0.8.53
Server Hostname:        yourdomain.com
Server Port:            80
 
Document Path:          /index.php
Document Length:        0 bytes
 
Concurrency Level:      50
Time taken for tests:   0.167 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      100
Total transferred:      36964 bytes
HTML transferred:       0 bytes
Requests per second:    597.74 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       83.649 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.673 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          215.77 [Kbytes/sec] received
 
Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    1   1.0      1       3
Processing:     5   79  72.2    149     153
Waiting:        5   79  72.1    149     153
Total:          5   80  73.0    152     154
 
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%    152
  66%    153
  75%    153
  80%    153
  90%    154
  95%    154
  98%    154
  99%    154
 100%    154 (longest request)

The key value we’re looking for here is the “Server Software”; if this still says Apache then you’ve done something wrong; in our case all is working as expected and we see that NGINX is taking care of all http requests.

The next step is to test Varnish with varnishlog:

[root@unicore]# varnishlog
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1301305458 1.0
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1301305461 1.0
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1301305464 1.0
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1301305467 1.0

You should see a bunch of ping / PONG requests; this means that Varnish is at least running and listening for traffic. Now to test that it’s actually processing the cache requests through from NGINX.

With the varnishlog still running, go to your website address, with your browser of choice and hit CTRL+F5 to force refresh; now immediately tab back to the terminal running varishlog. You should see a similar output to the following:

[root@unicore]# varnishlog
# varnishlog
    0 CLI          - Rd ping
    0 CLI          - Wr 200 19 PONG 1301306037 1.0
   13 SessionOpen  c 127.0.0.1 43934 :6081
   13 ReqStart     c 127.0.0.1 43934 1079128438
   13 RxRequest    c GET
   13 RxURL        c /
   13 RxProtocol   c HTTP/1.0
   13 RxHeader     c Host:  yourdomain.com
   13 RxHeader     c X-Real-IP: 127.0.0.1
   13 RxHeader     c X-Forwarded-For: 127.0.0.1
   13 RxHeader     c Connection: close
   13 RxHeader     c User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16
   13 RxHeader     c Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
   13 RxHeader     c Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
   13 RxHeader     c Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
   13 RxHeader     c Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
   13 RxHeader     c Cookie: wp-settings-1=m6%3Do%26m9%3Do%26m4%3Do%26editor%3Dhtml%26m2%3Do%26m7%3Do%26m0%3Do%26m1%3Dc%26m5%3Do; wp-settings-time-1=1299823407
   13 VCL_call     c recv
   13 VCL_return   c lookup
   13 VCL_call     c hash
   13 VCL_return   c hash
   13 VCL_call     c miss
   13 VCL_return   c fetch
   14 BackendOpen  b default 127.0.0.1 54955 127.0.0.1 8080
   13 Backend      c 14 default default
   14 TxRequest    b GET
   14 TxURL        b /
   14 TxProtocol   b HTTP/1.1
   14 TxHeader     b Host: yourdomain.com
   14 TxHeader     b X-Real-IP: 127.0.0.1
   14 TxHeader     b User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16
   14 TxHeader     b Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
   14 TxHeader     b Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
   14 TxHeader     b Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
   14 TxHeader     b Accept-Encoding: gzip
   14 TxHeader     b X-Forwarded-For: 127.0.0.1, 127.0.0.1
   14 TxHeader     b X-Varnish: 1079128438
   14 RxProtocol   b HTTP/1.1
   14 RxStatus     b 200
   14 RxResponse   b OK
   14 RxHeader     b Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:53:59 GMT
   14 RxHeader     b Server: Apache/2.2.17 (Fedora)
   14 RxHeader     b X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.5
   14 RxHeader     b X-Pingback: http:// yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php
   14 RxHeader     b Connection: close
   14 RxHeader     b Transfer-Encoding: chunked
   14 RxHeader     b Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

You’re all set! Now you can begin your own load-testing / benchmarking and once you’re happy with it; you can simply copy the steps and the configs over to your production environment and start enjoying a much quicker, more responsive webserver! Have fun ;]

Added “bonus”; see below for actual production server “Before” and “After” benchmarks with ApacheBench:

BEFORE:

[root@xxxxxxxxxx ~]# ab -c 50 -n 1000 http://xxxxxxxxxx.co.za/index.php
 
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
 
Benchmarking xxxxxxxxxx.co.za (be patient)
 
Server Software:        Apache
Server Hostname:        xxxxxxxxxx.co.za
Server Port:            xxxx
 
Document Path:          /index.php
Document Length:        135212 bytes
 
Concurrency Level:      50
Time taken for tests:   75.823314 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        262
   (Connect: 0, Length: 262, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      135659520 bytes
HTML transferred:       135201520 bytes
Requests per second:    13.19 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       3791.166 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       75.823 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1747.22 [Kbytes/sec] received
 
Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.6      0       4
Processing:   776 3743 2092.8   3534   38445
Waiting:      776 3667 2062.9   3475   38438
Total:        776 3743 2092.8   3534   38445
 
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%   3534
  66%   3896
  75%   4137
  80%   4300
  90%   4871
  95%   5609
  98%   6733
  99%  11005
 100%  38445 (longest request)

AFTER:

[root@xxxxxxxxxx ~]# ab -c 50 -n 1000 http://xxxxxxxxxx.co.za/index.php
 
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
 
Benchmarking xxxxxxxxxx.co.za (be patient)
 
Server Software:        nginx/0.8.53
Server Hostname:        xxxxxxxxxx.co.za
Server Port:            xxxx
 
Document Path:          /index.php
Document Length:        135040 bytes
 
Concurrency Level:      50
Time taken for tests:   0.321759 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      135374000 bytes
HTML transferred:       135040000 bytes
Requests per second:    3107.92 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       16.088 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.322 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          410869.66 [Kbytes/sec] received
 
Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.5      0       4
Processing:     4   15   1.7     15      22
Waiting:        0   14   2.1     15      22
Total:          4   15   1.6     15      22
 
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     15
  66%     16
  75%     16
  80%     16
  90%     16
  95%     16
  98%     17
  99%     19
 100%     22 (longest request)

Grab the latest version of flashplayer from Adobe:

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/?no_redirect

Once you’ve got that; simply extract it to your “/lib64″ folder. They are generally packed as “flashplayer<version>_64bit_linux_<build>.tar.gz” or something similar. After you’ve extracted the ‘libflashplayer.so’ to the /lib64 directory; you need to create a link to it for  Chrome.

# cd /opt/google/chrome/
# mkdir plugins
# cd plugins
# ln -sf /lib64/libflashplayer.so libflashplayer.so

Now restart Chrome and it should all be working as expected. You’re done!

If you do not see any flash elements; you will need to manually enable the plugins. Type “about:plugins” in the address bar and look for “Shockwave Flash”. Enable this and restart Chrome.

Just grab a backup of your current mail and put that in a safe place:

1
2
3

xjamesc@tigershark: cd .thunderbird
xjamesc@tigershark: cd <profile-identifier>.default
xjamesc@tigershark: tar cvf ~/mail-backup.tar Mail/

Now you’ll need to add the daily build into your APT source list and install Thunderbird 3.1

1
2
3

xjamesc@tigershark:  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
xjamesc@tigershark:  sudo apt-get update
xjamesc@tigershark:  sudo apt-get install thunderbird-3.1 thunderbird-3.1-gnome-support

If all went well you should have the latest version of Thunderbird installed and working; which at the time of writing this was “Shredder – 3.1″

In the event of the update not picking up your old mail profile; simply pull the backups you created earlier and either import them or just dump them into the new profile’s mail folder. You may need to recreate the accounts before doing this but you’ll see right away at start up if it’s automatically imported everything.

Enjoy!

First of all, let’s see how it will look:

< (R) Previous Page | Next Page (R) >

Where (R) is the number of results left of to come.

Let’s begin with connecting to the database:

<?php
  mysql_connect("localhost", "user", "pass");
  mysql_select_db("orange_co_za");

Next, do the query:

if(!$rowstart) {
  $rowstart=0;
}
 
$plus = $rowstart + 5;
$sql=mysql_query("SELECT * from templates limit $rowstart, $plus");
$numrows = mysql_query("SELECT * from templates");

Then the while loop:

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql, MYSQL_BOTH) {
  RESULT $rows=$rows+1;
}

Wait a minute… This is going way too fast!
Let’s explain a couple of things

Check if the $rowstart variable is set, if not, set it to 0.
The rowstart variable set’s the row where the query begins

if(!$rowstart) {
  $rowstart=0;
}

Now setting the number of results we want shown:

$plus = $rowstart + 5;

With this data set, we can do the query, where the $numrows variable is the number of rows, counted from the query:

  $sql=mysql_query("SELECT * from templates limit $rowstart, $plus");
  $numrows = mysql_query("SELECT * from templates");

This code is for counting the number of results on the page.

  $rows=$rows+1;

Place this code whereever you want the < (R) Previous Page | Next Page (R) >
to appear.

if ($rowstart >= 5) {
  $rowstart=$rowstart-5;
    echo "<A HREF=?x=70&rowstart=". $rowstart ."> < (5) Previous Page |</A>";
  $rowstart=$rowstart+5;
}
 
$rowsleft=($numrows-$rows)-$rowstart;
 
if ($rowsleft > 0) {
  $rowstart=$rowstart+5;
  echo "<A HREF=?x=70&rowstart=". $rowstart ."> Next Page ($rowsleft) ></A>";
}

Have fun!

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, it really is, but for an object to be defined, you have to have a template on which you will define the object. This is where classes come in. A class is a blueprint for one or more objects. Therefore, an object is to a class what a variable is to a type. A class is a set of characteristics, and an object is entity that is defined based on those characteristics. Another example: let’s think about a ‘cellphone’ class. Such a class could have a characteristic (property) called “model” for example. All objects created based on this class would have such a characteristic, but some objects would initialize this property to “v600”, others to “d500”, and so on. This means that the class only holds a definition, and the object holds the actual value.

You can declare a class by using the “class” keyword. Let’s define a simple class:

class cellphone_class {
  var $model; //the model of the cellphone
  var $manf; //the manufacturer
  var $price; //the price of the cellphone
 
function is_cheap()  {
  return ($this->price < 2000); //returns TRUE if the price is smaller than 2000 Rands
  }
}

In this small example you can notice some of the most important aspects of a class. After the declaration of the class, you can see the variables used within the class, which are called properties. These are declared using the “var” statement. While they can be defined anywhere within the class, you should really define them at the very top, so you can better see the class’ properties. The functions within the class are called methods; they’re used to manipulate the class’ properties and produce results. In that simple method you can see that when we use a class method or property, we must use the “->” operator. The keyword “this” tells PHP that the property of method belongs to the class being defined.

An object is a special variable that contains a bundle of other variables and functions; you always have to use a class upon which to create an object. But, unlike a class, you won’t need to write any code, nor you will see how the class actually works. While you may first think that this isn’t so great, in fact this is one of the main concepts of object-oriented programming. You only have to create the class once, then you can create a zillion objects, in a zillion other projects.

While a class only exists in code and is considered to be a blueprint, an object exists in memory and is a working instance of a class. An instance of an object is created using the “new” statement along with the name of the class the object is based on. Let’s return to our cellphone class:

$phone_object = new cellphone_class();
$phone_object->model = "v620";
$phone_object->price = 2000;
 
if($phone_object->is_cheap()) {
  print "This phone is cheap!";
 
} else {
  print "This phone is expensive!";
}

You can see that we use the “->” operator to access and modify object’s properties. After that, we use the same operator to call a method.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of object-oriented code is its reusability. Because the classes used to create objects are self-enclosed, they can be easily pulled from one project and inserted into another. Additionally, it is possible to create child classes that inherit and/or override the characteristics of their parents. This technique allows you to create more complex and specialized objects. Even if you start with a small class, you can develop it to a complex class by time, with adding more properties and objects to its children classes.

Hope the Easter Bunny spoils you and you have a super long weekend with your loved ones!

The Orange Art Team

April has started already – only 2 months to go to the World Cup!  Hope you are all prepared, got your team shirts and schedules planned!

While you are enjoying the World Cup, why not let a Website promote your business?

We are running a new special :  NO Design Fees will be charged, subject to signing a 12-month maintenance contract for R456 per month, inclusive of VAT!

This is the perfect deal, saving you loads of money and promoting your business in one of the most effective ways possible!

Contact me now to get this fantastic offer!

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Please stay safe during the Easter Holidays!

Jangy

jangeline@orangeart.co.za

http://www.pelagodesign.com/sidecar/emogrifier/

If you need your html / xhtml converted into an “Outlook” friendly format then you absolutely have to use this… it even does Google mail too! Amazing work guys; thank you!

James =]