lamp

With the VPS expansion you can now get a (very) small virtual private server (VPS) for a very affordable price. However, when you get a server with something like 256MB or 512MB RAM and a portion of CPU power, using default MySQL/PHP/Apache settings is a pretty bad idea.

Performance and scalability tuning of a server is more of an art than science, in the sense that there're no ready-to-use formulas. Optimal server settings depend on many unique factors: web-app code, traffic to the site, site's information architecture among other things. It's virtually impossible to really optimize server settings without thorough understanding of the web application and a lot of testing.

That said, you are not going to run newsweek.com or huffingtonpost.com on a 256MB slice. Also, the default settings are typically so off that it is possible to give you a much better starting point. I'd like to share with you some settings that have worked well for me. I am assuming you are running a small site or a blog, with the traffic of several thousand page-views/day, using Wordpress, Drupal or something of that kind. I highly recommend getting at least a 512MB VPS, but these settings are better than the default for a 256MB server, as well.

Following are some variables for various settings files that have been modified from their default values.

I am always on the lookout for good IDEs, including the ones for PHP. There are several decent ones on the market. From the open-source ones, Eclipse with PDT does a decent job, for local development, if you do not mind extra weight of a JDK-based IDE. It has some other issues as well (poor support of on-the-server development via SFTP and forcing the use of pre-configured projects are a few), but Eclipse is not what we'd like to discuss in this post, today.

Today I stumbled upon a new (for me) Windows-based, PHP IDE: EngInSite PHP IDE and I was, quite frankly, blown away! EngInSite is, quite simply, the best PHP IDE on a Windows platform. I have been playing around with it for a couple hours now and I have to yet find a feature I would like that it does not have. It's a very rare example of a perfect tool.

Few important features from the long list of this IDE's capabilities:

XAMPP is one of the greatest (i.e most useful) bundled open-source packages that gives an easy, rich LAMP installation in seconds.

If you have tried it, you know that installing many different PHP extensions is neither easy nor fun on Linux. Well, except, maybe on Debian/Ubuntu where you can easily add components with apt-get. Alas, a lot of corporate production systems run RedHat and there XAMPP comes as real life-saver.

One thing about XAMPP though - it installs a whole bunch of stuff like Apache, PHP, MySQL, Proftpd, Webmin etc. I never use or enable FTP because I think it is insecure, legacy protocol that should never be used. Use SSH instead. As for MySQL, I like to install it myself from official MySQL binary distribution. It\'s a database server, hence - tricky and needs more attention than a vanilla installation. At least - that is my taste.

So, how do we disable FTP, MySQL and WebMin in XAMPP installation and use it only for Apache/PHP/Perl (we could install Python add-on, too) ?