HauntedShell » Reviews http://hauntedshell.com Just another Hauntedshell.com weblog Sat, 01 May 2010 20:05:47 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Lighttd: Put your webserver on a diet http://hauntedshell.com/2008/10/13/lighttd-put-your-webserver-on-a-diet/ http://hauntedshell.com/2008/10/13/lighttd-put-your-webserver-on-a-diet/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:19:13 +0000 Kwame http://www.hauntedshell.com/?p=88 When you’re working with limited system resources, every bit that can be freed up counts. And if you have do your web development on machine with only 384mb of RAM, you start to be become a bit, um, mercenary about your resources. Running an Apache+PHP+MySQL stack alongside a GNOME desktop (xfce or fluxbox would be better but we all like our little luxuries) , Firefox and a text editor is not my idea of an efficient workspace. When you take the fact that I’ll be working on a wordpress install with about 19k entries, you start getting a sour taste in your mouth.

That’s where Lighttpd comes in. It’s ,according to its site,

�designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems”

Anyways, what we’re interested in is the small memory footprint and the effective management of the cpu-load part.

Installation

We need to get and install lighttpd, PHP and MySQL:

Guides available from:
Instructions from Lighttpd Trac
Lighttpd installation instructions from *Nix Craft
Lighttpd+PHP+Perl+MySQL installation guide for Windows users
Lighttpd+PHP+MySQL Installation guide for Ubuntu
A few notes:

  • The settings for fastcgi suggested on the Lighttpd wiki will load a large number of php-cgi process that you probably will not be using. I’ll probably suggest you set 
    "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "2"

    instead of

    "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16"

    You can make adjustments later if you feel the need.

  • You need to modify the default my.cnf to make things a bit more effcient. You can follow this guide to get you started.

Does it help to use lighttpd instead of apache? Yeah, it does. I’ve been using it for the last couple of weeks and it’s been able to handle my requirements without problem. My final opinion? Well, it is not as full featured as apache but if you have a limited memory budget or are just looking for a lean mean web server, you really should take a good look at lighttpd. Now if you don’t mind, some of us have real work to do and can’t spend all day reading other people’s blogs ;-) .

]]> http://hauntedshell.com/2008/10/13/lighttd-put-your-webserver-on-a-diet/feed/ 2 Samurize: The Way of the Desktop Warrior http://hauntedshell.com/2008/07/30/samurize-the-way-of-the-desktop-warrior/ http://hauntedshell.com/2008/07/30/samurize-the-way-of-the-desktop-warrior/#comments Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:29:58 +0000 Kwame http://www.hauntedshell.com/?p=68 If you are a member of that special group of computer users, the tinkerers, you are going to wonder where Samurize has been all your life. I’d seen it mentioned a few times on Lifehacker but never really paid attention. Well, my mistake. “What is Samurize?”, you ask. Well, Samurize is “an advanced system monitoring and desktop enhancement engine for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista”. Translation: lots of stats and very cool ways to play with and display them.
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The scope of features is just way too big to get into right now but basically you get to select the stats(called meters) you want, where they are displayed and how they are displayed. For example, I’m using Samurize to embedd my CPU usage, Uptime, RAM usage, free space on my C:\ and the contents of a text file containing my to-do list on my desktop.
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The built in meters include disk usage, cpu usage, network traffic, memory usage, uptime, system temperatures, battery levels, POP/IMAP mailboxes….it’s quite a comprehensive list). You can also monitor other computers over a network or publish your stats using the included server. You can even write your own scripts to power these meters if you need some specific information. The built-configuration editor allows you to really get finetune your settings and looks although it can be a bit intimidating for first time users with all the options that are available.
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All in all, Samurize is a great utility, offering comprehensive information and in-depth customization of how that information is presented. I recommend it to anyone who wants to monitor system information or anything else, for that matter.

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