Posts Tagged ‘performance’

Knowing Not! :]

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

Today I have Marketing exam. Ofcourse as usual when I have exams I haven’t studied enough, and again I’m in the situation realizing I don’t know anything. I depend 100% on God’s grace to take that exam. Why I’m so dumb never study when

I have what I have. I can’t change my self I can’t study something I’m not interested into. Marketing is a subject which is simple but for Jerks IMHO :]. The logic of marketing is too abstract.

And yes what’s happening with me the last days. Well I’m feeling good now Praise the Lord. I’ve no idea what I should do with my life. I have 2 re-exams for now or maybe 3 ( I don’t know the results from the Research & Statistics Exam ).

The last few days I ran FreeDOS and Windows 2000 Pro SP4 under FreeBSD 6.2 with qemu. FreeDOS’s performance is very nice despite the fact it is emulated. The Windows is running a little laggish although I ran it with kqemu ( Experimental Module for qemu which enhances the typical qemu speed ). Yesterday we drink a dark beer with Nomen into the “Happy Person” Pub. My passion for computers is starting to come back again.

Opera!

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Yesterday I and Alex went to an Opera. We watched Opera by Giuseppe Verdi called “La Traviata”.It’s the second time I see this opera, the first time was when I was still a puppil.Pretty awesome opera the actors were really good. And this classic music! Awesome!After the Opera performance I phoned to Ivo a.k.a. (Order)we went to a sort of pub which wasextremely cheap considering the fact it was near the center and the food and drinks were really good.After all this we had a walk around in Varna and hitted the road back to Dobrich.Kimmo My finish colleague is leaving for Finland and was organizing farewell party.Unfortunately because of the Opera I was unable to go to the party. Yesterday was a really niceday considering that nice opera show. The bad news for me yesterday was that I didn’t passedthe written exam in German and I have to go to the re-sit at Tuesday. With the Lord’s helpI hope I would pass it 🙂 Also I’m going to start for the Accounting exam because It’s at Monday.END—–

How to disable nginx static requests access.log logging

Monday, March 5th, 2012

NGINX logo Static Content Serving Stop logging

One of the companies, where I'm employed runs nginx as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) server.
Actually nginx, today has become like a standard for delivering tremendous amounts of static content to clients.
The nginx, server load has recently increased with the number of requests, we have much more site visitors now.
Just recently I've noticed the log files are growing to enormous sizes and in reality this log files are not used at all.
As I've used disabling of web server logging as a way to improve Apache server performance in past time, I thought of implying the same little "trick" to improve the hardware utilization on the nginx server as well.

To disable logging, I proceeded and edit the /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf file, commenting inside every occurance of:

access_log /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log main;

to

#access_log /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log main;

Next, to load the new nginx.conf settings I did a restart:

nginx:~# killall -9 nginx; sleep 1; /etc/init.d/nginx start

I expected, this should be enough to disable completely access.log, browser request logins. Unfortunately /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log was still displaying growing with:

nginx:~# tail -f /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log

After a bit thorough reading of nginx.conf config rules, I've noticed there is a config directive:

access_log off;

Therefore to succesfully disable logging I had to edit config occurance of:

access_log /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log main

to

After a bit thorough reading of nginx.conf config rules, I've noticed there is a config directive:

access_log off;

Therefore to succesfully disable logging I had to edit config occurance of:

access_log /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log main

to

access_log /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log main
access_log off;

Finally to load the new settings, which thanksfully this time worked, I did nginx restart:

nginx:~# killall -9 nginx; sleep 1; /etc/init.d/nginx start

And hooray! Thanks God, now nginx logging is disabled!

As a result, as expected the load avarage on the server reduced a bit 🙂

W3 total Cache a nice wordpress “all in one” wordpress Caching plugin

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

w3 total cache logo wordpress speed up w3tc

In my recent question of looking for best ways to optimize my wordpress blog, as well as other wordpress based websites, I’m managing I’ve come across a great plugin called W3 Total Cache or W3TC as it’s widely known among wordpress geeks.

The full caching wordpress solution in face of W3TC is already actively deployed among many major wordpress powered websites, to name a few:
stevesouders.com, mattcutts.com, mashable.com

I gave a try W3 Total Cache and was amazed about the rich caching functionality it provides. Having the W3TC plugin installed adds a whole menu on the left wordpress admin panel reading Performance , clicking on it shows a menu with thorough choices on numerous things which deal with the running of wordpress on the server.
Here is a screenshot on the menus W3 Total Cache provides:

w3 total cache whole wordpress caching pages and sql solution

The plugin has support for html caching, sql caching, CDN, CSS and Javascript compress & minify etc.
To test the plugin adequately I disabled HyperCache and Db Cache . My observations is that with W3TC wordpress renders php and the overall user experience and download times in wordpress are better. Therefore I’ll probably use only W3 Total Cache as a cacher for wordpress installs.
Besides that I had some issues on some wordpress based websites with the Db Cache SQL caching.
On these websites after enabling Db Cache, suddenly page edditing of the created existing pages started returning empty pages. This could be due to the fact that these wordpress based websites was customly tailered and many code was wiped out, however it could also be a Db Cache bug. So to conclude W3TC is the perfect solution for wordpress caching 😉

WP-Minify, Scripts Gzip and HeadJS Loader three scripts that might have positive impact on WordPress performance

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

I’m trying to get the most of server + wordpress performance and these days I’m heavily playing with it as one can read from my past few articles 😉

Today I’ve come across three other plugins which in many cases could be beneficial and bring a good performance increase in wordpress, this are:
 

  • WP-Minify – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minify/
  • HeadJS Loader – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headjs-loader/
  • Scripts Gzip – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scripts-gzip/

WP-Minify – does combine all JS and CSS script into one consolidated compressed script or style as well removes any duplicate script resources and hence could have positive impact on performance

HeadJS Loader – does strips out all your old javascript declarations and puts them into one head.js file so that they are loaded in parallel in the head of the pages and through that prevents the blocking of load up until all JS is a loaded so commonly seen these days on the net for more info on how HeadJS works check out http://headjs.com

Script Gzip – merges and compresses the CSS and JS links on page, the plugin does not have caching functionality. The plugin doesn’t have much configuration options which I find as a good thing

To find out what works best for you its a best practice if the website speed load time is tested after loading each of the plugins and with all of them enabled and configured, finally for best results just leave only the plugins or a combination of them which gives the lowest page responce times.

How to protect Munin Web statistics with password on GNU / Linux

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

I just installed munin to track in web the performance of few Debian servers. I’ve configured munin to open via a Virtualhosts in Apache. As its always wise to protect any statistics data about the server from the unwanted possible security violators, I decided to protect Munin with Apache .htaccess.

The munin htmldir output dir is configured to be in /var/www/munin, hence I protected my munin with password by:

1. Creating .htaccess file in /var/www/munin with following content

AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/.munin_htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName EnterPassword
AuthType Basic

require user admin

2. Creating /etc/apache2/.munin_htpasswd with htpasswd (htaccess password generator cmd)

debian:/var/www/munin# htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/.munin_htpasswd admin
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user admin

Another important thing I had to do is set my VirtualHost file to be configured with AllowOverride All , if AllowOverride All is missing the .htaccess and .htpasswd are not red at all.
Afterwards munin is protected with password, and when my virtualdomain where munin lays e.g. http://munin.mydomain.com is accessed the .htpasswd password dialog pops up 😉

Possible way to increase Linux TCP/IP port thoroughput via sysctl kernel variable

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Sysctl is a great way to optimize Linux. sysctl has a dozens of values which could drastically improve server networking and overall performance.

One of the many heplful variables to optimize the way the Linuz kernel works on busy servers is net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range .

The default sysctl setting for net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range on Debian, Ubuntu Fedora, RHEL, CentOS is:

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 32768 65536

This means that the kernel and the corresponding server running services instructing the Linuz kernel open new port sockets can only open local ports in the range of 32768 – 65536 .
On a regular Desktop GNU/Linux machine or a not high iron server this settins is perfectly fine, however on a high scale servers the local port range in the interval of 32768-65536 might be insufficient at times, especially if there are programs which require binding of many local ports.

Therefore on a high load servers, generally it’s a good to raise the port range to be assigned by kernel to 8912 – 65536 , to do so the setting has to be changed like shown below:

linux:~# sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 8192 65536
...

If changing this setting on the server doesn’t show any negative impact on performance in few hours time or a day or even better decreases the server average load, it’s a good idea that it be added to sysctl.conf to load up the setting on next kernel boot.

linux:~# echo 'net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range' >> /etc/sysctl.conf

Enjoy 😉