Author Archives: Alex

Simple Magento Sort Optimization Patch

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Alex

While doing some profiling and benchmarking of Magento to test PHP-FPM I found that Magento was spending roughly a quarter of the run time for some page loads on comparing attributes. This struck me as odd, and so I looked … Continue reading →

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Using PHP-FPM with Apache 2.2

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Alex

There a lot of ways to use PHP with Apache, with the most popular probably being mod_php due to its ease of use. However there are many problems with mod_php both security and performance-wise and other solutions have been created … Continue reading →

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Installing Apache Solr on CentOS

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Alex

Apache’s Solr search platform is a common solution for more flexible and better performing searches on sites that have outgrown their database’s built-in search facilities. Here at Nexcess, the most common use is by clients with Magento Enterprise Edition (the … Continue reading →

Posted in Apache | 2 Comments

Running CGI Scripts on the CLI

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Alex

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is one of the oldest and most widely supported methods of adding dynamic content to a website. However, debugging CGI scripts can be quite a pain, since often the error messages are vague and unhelpful (such … Continue reading →

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Source Control with Git

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Alex

While there are numerous version control systems available these days, Git (created by Linus Torvalds) has become very popular recently. In this post, I’m going to cover the basic usage of Git, along with other helpful tools. Git is cross-platform, … Continue reading →

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Software RAID on Linux with mdadm

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Alex

Software RAID can be a great alternative when greater disk redundancy and/or performance is needed but the expense of a hardware RAID card can’t be justified. On Linux, software RAID almost universally means mdadm, so that is what I’m going … Continue reading →

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Installing VirtualBox on CentOS 5 with Web Interface

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Alex

Virtual machines are undeniably useful in web hosting, not just as an offered service but also just for testing and debugging issues. However, while VMWare and Xen offer good performance they require a server dedicated to running just the VMWare … Continue reading →

Posted in Nexcess | 3 Comments

Ruby 1.8.7 (and Newer) on CentOS 5 With RVM

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Alex

We use CentOS almost exclusively here at Nexcess.net and while it’s very stable, a downside is that it often ships with older versions of software. Unfortunately, Ruby is one of those older software packages that we find our clients will … Continue reading →

Posted in Apache | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments