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Optimize PHP and Accelerate Apache
An anonymous reader writes "As the load on an application increases, the bottlenecks in the underlying infrastructure become more apparent in the form of slow response to user requests. This article discusses many of the server configuration items that can make or break an application's performance and focuses on steps you can take to optimize Apache and PHP."
want performance from php?
Dump Apache! its the slowest link!
use Lighttpd + latest PHP 5.2.2 + APC
You should compile it yourself wicked fast compiler optimizations on top of your wicked fast install of Gentoo (which you also compiled yourself)
Sucks
no text
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Maybe I'm being a cynical bastard again, but that article is REEEALLY light on content. Compared to the other featured articles from IBM, which are usually very rich and informative, this one is more like an "idiots guide to apache", the kind that belongs on Digg's mountain of filth. This is little more than a rehash of the Readme files for Apache and PHP combined. It's about as deep as telling a windows user how to make their PC faster by changing to the Windows NT theme. Of much greater value to web professionals is this article from a fellow OSDN site (!) Lighttpd can lighten Apache's load
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Last year, we dumped apache (and http altogether) and went with a gopherd/fastcgi approach for serving up our php pages. For people still stuck on port 80, we have a squid proxy which converts the request to gopher. Since then, traffic has increased 34%, while average load has dropped by 20%.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's common knowledge that Apache certainly isn't the fastest out there to server web pages. For static pages lighttpd and, heck, even a basic stand-alone Tomcat (yup, a Java server!) can easily serve as many pages as Apache. That was already the case for, say, Java 1.5 / Tomcat 5.5. Now take Java 1.6 and Tomcat 6 (or, better, Resin [not completely free]) and suddenly Apache is looking even more ridiculous.
For anything SSL related IIS makes fun of Apache.
For many concurrent sessions there are proof of concept servers written in functional languages (like erlang) that handle an order of magnitude (!) more simultaneous sessions than what Apache does.
I understand that for many here Apache is all they know and hence regard it as the holy grail but it is far, far, from being that. It is a good overall purpose web server but it is certainly not the fastest.
In the face of the countless security holes that are all too common in C-written apps I'm now more and more installing pure Java web servers. At first I was using Apache + Tomcat now I'm more and more using Tomcat in standalone mode. Easier configuration, no buffer overflows to patch.
"I also expect that the language is going to be forked at some point unless the PHP developers clean up the function naming - it's infuriating."
There's nothing to stop you from cleaning up the function naming. We'd all appreciate it :-)
Also, if you really want performance "uber alles", don't bother with apache or any other "pre-made" server - write a custom server in c designed to load modules that serve just the content you want served. You can then handle a thousand requests per second (including time to access the database a half-dozen times per request) on comodity hardware.
Its not like there isn't code out there that shows you how to implement a server in c, how to write and load modules in c, how to use threads in c, and how to access mysql via c. You'll be super fast ... except that your development time will be super slow.
apache+php is a compromose that most people can live with, most of the time.
Yes, the function naming in php is crap. Show us a scripting language where it isn't.
I had a customer (I am a contract programmer, working on a per-project basis) who had an emmense PHP / MySQL application that ran so slowly it was unuseable. We did every simple optimization such as is described in this article, and more. In the end, the issue was clearly that there was simply a lot of PHP code, and a lot of it using PHP's objects, and searches through arrays, and that sort of thing. The biggest performance increases we were getting was when we could push some sort of comparison or logic from PHP into the SQL query.
What we did was re-write all of the application except the parts that actually printed HTML to the page in C. We made that library into a php extension, which we added to our php installation. The speed ups varied according to the type of code, of course. MySQL queries changed hardly at all. A simple for loop might speed up from 100 to 1000 times, however, and a for loop that involved some sort of object oriented operations -- say, the creatation of a new object with each iteration, in an extreme example -- could be sped up from 10,000 to 100,000 times.
Now, most code that was sped up 100,000 times, when examined closely, could be sped up in PHP also by writing it smarter. But bad C code still runs faster than good PHP code.
If your disk drives are slow, or your code is printing a debugging log that has every function entry and exit to a network shared disk, or something like that, don't even think about C, just fix the basic problem first.
However, in my experience, twiddling the apache configs for "AllowOverride" and stuff like that will never get you as big a speed up as moving PHP code to C.
Note, that the way we did it, we moved all the core functionality and logic to a C library, but most of the display stuff was left in PHP. This meant that most ongoing development could continue to be done by cheaper, less skilled people who knew only PHP, MySQL, javascript, and CSS.
It includes:
Disclaimer: this is stuff that I have written.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Just keep IIS in its native environment and we'll get WIMP... :)
Some of us make a living doing this and the tools we use on the server have one job.
No, really? I do to too actually.
That job is to send content to the client as fast as possible.
Wrong. That job is to get the job done, fast, good and cheap, and if that doesn't work (which it never does) it's to evaluate the best tradeoffs without bugging the client to much. And by client I mean the one with the two legs and the checkbook that doesn't give a damn wether you're using Ruby or PHP or Django or Symfony or Zope or Rails or whatnot but wants to see his webapp ASAP.
There are numerous tradeoffs in the architecture and configuration of web servers and scripting languages and when you're working with this stuff everyday the sub-optimal becomes irritating.
And you know what the suboptimal and the optimal is? No? Well, then you are aware of more than most posters I sorta quoted above.
If it's all a bit over your head, I suggest you instead participate in discussions at a level you're more comfortable with.
WTF? I've been programming since '86 and have been doing webstuff for a living since 2000. I don't see nothing over my head here. Just a tad incoherent for a community made up of what seems like 90% part-time webdevs with each their own favorite toolset. A community of which 80% act as if they where members of the Linux Kernel Team and come across a bit silly at times. Don't get me wrong, there are interesting posts here. But for each of those it looks as if three 'expert' posts sound like what I was moking. And that what I was poking at with the parent post.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Here are a few tips:
Best of luck!