February 25th, 2008
Posted by Fred Wu
So I had a play with LiteSpeed just recently. Let’s have a look at what the benchmark says.
Tool used: ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0
Benchmark object: My WordPress blog (homepage), of course I made an exact copy of the current blog you’re seeing to my VPS box (which has both Apache and LiteSpeed installed).
Both Apache and LiteSpeed use default configuration parameters. Since the benchmark was done on the same server, hardware is the same, however there are some software differences.
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Tags: Apache, benchmark, comparison, httpd, LiteSpeed, PHP, Suhosin, VPS, web server, WP Super Cache, XCache
Posted in Server | 15 Comments »
February 25th, 2008
Posted by Fred Wu
This is a How-to guide for users who want to install and experiment LiteSpeed on LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box, with or without Apache.
If you don’t know what LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box is, please check out this link. Also here is a nice review. In short, LxAdmin is a free/cheap alternative web hosting control panel to cPanel.
And LiteSpeed is a high performance, lightweight commercial web server that outperforms Apache, or even Lighttpd. The standard version is free, but has a limitation of 150 concurrent connections.
All my current shared hosting accounts are using cPanel, I wasn’t a big fan of it because it was (and still is) bloated and buggy. cPanel 11 did improve a little bit so I now at least don’t *hate* to use it. I’ve been playing with different web control panels for a few years now. Did I mention I once even co-owned a web hosting company? :) I personally prefer the simplicity of DirectAdmin, and the nice interface-feature balance of Interworx-CP. Although they are very good control panels, they aren’t free. Web developers (such as myself) and programmers often need VPS or even dedicated servers to perform live testing and debugging. A free control panel seems to be a nice and affordable addition to this process. :) I had been searching for one for years. Believe it or not, all free control panels sucked at that time. They either had the feature or had the interface, but never had both. Until recently (and that was about a year ago) I had discovered LxAdmin, it is in my opinion the best overall free/cheap control panel to date. I got the free 300-domain license a while ago, I’m not sure if it’s still available but even if it’s not, it is dirt cheap. Feature wise it is much more powerful than DirectAdmin, and interface wise it is pretty similar to Plesk (which by the way I don’t really like, but still better than other free ones such as ServerCP).
I discovered LiteSpeed a few years ago and had played with it for a bit. At that time the free version still has a concurrent connection limit of 300. Anyway, the experience was pretty good. It is a shame though that the price tag for the enterprise version is a little extreme for personal use. If I had a high profile website or a company website then I would definitely consider using LiteSpeed. It has a very useful web GUI that controls all the configuration. No messing around with shell commands and files any more!
Okay that was a little background story, now let’s begin incorporating the two together.
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Tags: Apache, control panel, free control panel, guide, Host-In-A-Box, how-to, httpd, HyperVM, LiteSpeed, LSWS, LxAdmin, web hosting, web server
Posted in General | 2 Comments »
February 24th, 2008
Posted by Fred Wu
I always wanted to write about WordPress plugins, it’s like Firefox: it works well out-of-box, but the goodies are all in the plugins (Firefox call them extensions). Some day in the future I’ll probably write about my 40 odd Firefox extensions, but today, let me talk about what plugins I have installed on my current blog. :)
Before I go on talking about the plugins, you should know that this by no means is a complete list of useful plugins even though I have tried much more than what is in the list.
Here it begins, the list is in alphabetic order.
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Tags: AJAX Comments, All in One SEO Pack, cforms II, Chunk Urls for WordPress, Defensio Anti-Spam, Digg This, DiggClick, FeedBurner, FeedSmith, Google Analyticator, Google XML Sitemaps, plugin, Simple Tags, Sociable, SyntaxHighlighter, SyntaxHighlighter Plus, Wordpress, WordPress.com Stats, WP 2.3 Related Posts, WP Super Cache, WP-DBManager
Posted in PHP, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
February 23rd, 2008
Posted by Fred Wu
Update: There is now a more recent comparison of CodeIgniter 1.7.1, Kohana 2.3.1 and Yii 1.0.3.
When I was reading through my subscribed feeds I came across this post: Notes on Choosing a PHP Framework: A Comparison of CakePHP and the Zend Framework by Chad Kieffer.
Chad has done a great job comparing the two frameworks that he’s interested in. That inspired me to write something up for the frameworks that I prefer and use. :)
I began hunting for PHP frameworks ever since Ruby on Rails hit the street. Coincidentally one of the first PHP frameworks I played with was CakePHP. At that time CakePHP’s documentation was nearly non-existent so I had to seek for an alternative. I did a lot of searches, and researches, and finally I was happy to see CodeIgniter. Its user guide was what impressed me the most, I am sure many of the fellow CI users would agree with me on this one. Because of the excellent documentation, I was able to start working on projects right after I spent a few hours on the user guide! Developing apps on CI was such a breeze! Today, I develop web applications in CodeIgniter, Kohana and Zend Framework. If you want to find out how to use Zend Framework components with CI or Kohana, please read my previous blog entry: Using Zend Framework with CodeIgniter.
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Tags: CodeIgniter, comparison, framework, Kohana, php framework, Zend Framework
Posted in CodeIgniter, Kohana, Zend Framework | 52 Comments »
February 21st, 2008
Posted by Fred Wu
If you ever wanted to integrate CodeIgniter and Zend Framework, you might have come across this tutorial by Daniel Vecchiato.
Whilst Daniel has done a great job demonstrating the possibility of using the two frameworks together, concerns have been made: do we actually need to use hooks?
As I understand it, hooks are used to extend the core functionalities of CodeIgniter (as explained in the user guide). Obviously Zend Framework and CodeIgniter are two different systems and there is no intention for us to extend CodeIgniter’s core functionality with Zend Framework.
Using hooks can be dangerous as it’s system-wide, and it modifies the system behaviour.
What I have done is to simply use CodeIgniter’s library structure to load the Zend Framework resources. Below is the tutorial.
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Tags: CodeIgniter, framework, Kohana, php framework, Zend Framework
Posted in CodeIgniter, Kohana, Zend Framework | 52 Comments »
February 6th, 2008
Posted by Fred Wu
My two-month vacation in China is almost over, I’m now starting to get back to ‘work’. There are a few interesting and exciting projects under the hood. :)
Doing development work in China is more challenging, many web resources are filtered/banned in China including Wikipedia. It’s not funny to rely on proxy servers for accessing information. :(
The good thing is however, bandwidth here is unlimited (oh did I mention I’m in Australia where bandwidth is more expensive than sliced bread?), and DVDs are dirt cheap (I just bought 100 of them, shee don’t tell anyone).
GG
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Posted in General | Comments Off