Archive for May, 2010
Cherokee Web Server… when lighter and faster is a must
Sometimes when it comes to choosing a web server we always end up in the same decision: Apache… it’s alright, it’s the most widely used web server but that doesn’t mean it’s the best one.
When we started with Inkzee we didn’t think too much about other alternatives… we started with Apache and it’s not that we had big complaints about it, but having all the backend in one machine made us have performance/low resource consumption requirements and after a few months of our service running the all the different backend subsystems were almost killing the server and we started to research alternatives.
We were going to change Apache for Lighttpd but then we stepped into Cherokee statistics and after reading some reviews we decided to give it a try, the numbers spoke for themselves. We had been checking on Che
rokee for some years now, the project was mature enough for our needs so we went for it.
After a year and a half we can write our own lessons-learned from our experience:
- The Cherokee team have been so responsive to every problem or tweak we wanted to do with our server.
- The admin interface is pretty rad, if you are not used to messing with config files you’ll find no challenge.
- We didn’t miss anything: FastCGI, PHP, TLS and SSL, Load Balancer, Reverse Proxy, statics cache, …
- And the most important for us: our servers stand the load so much better now… indeed now we are still able to have our service in just one server
So, dare to try it now that Cherokee is celebrating their version 1.0 release, it’s a really nice product worth trying.
Using Zend Framework
One of our team members is a testing ninja and we bring him on board exactly because of that. We wanted to make our testing framework more robust so we asked for his wise expertise. One of the things he proposed was the use of Zend Framework. I’m not very keen of frameworks but it’s true that from a code point of view, we do need to get a better MVC architecture than the one we have now.
This is specially true now that it’s not just me coding, but a couple more people, so we are migrating part of the code to the Zend Framework or more precisely, to a tuned version of it we want to build. The idea is to only use what’s necessary to be able to create interface tests in a very reliable way. Right now this is not entirely possible without Selenium (our testing UI server), and what we want is to don’t need a webserver to run the tests.
We’ll be migrating parts of the UI and will be living with both environments until we’ve migrated all the code.
