Author Archives: Alex
Turpentine Update
It’s been a couple of months since we initially released the Turpentine extension for Magento. It has come quite a ways in that time, with these new features added: Hole-punch support via ESI (and optionally AJAX) Initial cookie bypass support … Continue reading
Nexcess Moving to Apache/PHP-FPM
Here at Nexcess we’re always on the lookout for ways of improving our technology stack for our clients. This means making things like Varnish or Memcached, which can improve application performance tremendously, to be easy to deploy and manage on … Continue reading
Simple Magento Sort Optimization Patch
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
Using PHP-FPM with Apache 2.2
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
Installing Apache Solr on CentOS
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
Running CGI Scripts on the CLI
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
Source Control with Git
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
Software RAID on Linux with mdadm
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
Installing VirtualBox on CentOS 5 with Web Interface
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
Ruby 1.8.7 (and Newer) on CentOS 5 With RVM
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
