I wrote a post not too long ago about using lighttpd (lighty) to ease your server load. My setup consisted of one high-end server box (2x Dual-core Xeon's, RAID 5, 6GB RAM) running Windows Server 2003 x64 and Virtual Server 2005. Virtual Server had three VM's running... my CF/IIS server, my database server, and my lighttpd server... All running on Windows 2003 Server Standard.

Now, the lighttpd box always had a cpu load of 30-50%... Not a big deal, considering it was always pushing 6-10mbps of files at any given moment, day or night. I eventually hit up the friendly folks in #lightpd on FreeNode, asking if I could somehow tweak my config file even more, to get performance as such that I could run a single lighttpd thread to handle all the traffic. The general response was "Don't use Windows."

Now, I know you're all thinking that the response was typical for OSS people, but I decided to give it a try. I whipped up another VM, installed SUSE 10.2 on it, and set up lighttpd. I redirected my traffic from the Windows VM to the Linux one (which was easy and instantaneous thanks to my firewall, IPCop, which will be covered in a future post), and low and behold, a single lighttpd thread was handling all the traffic.

Not only was a single thread handling it all, but CPU usage on the linux box was peaking at 2%, with little disk usage and plenty of free memory. Also, as I watched the bandwidth usage over the course of the day, I noticed that the bursts were able to actually burst higher (i.e. push more traffic and/or handle more simultaneous requests) than they were on Windows. This enabled me to take advantage of low-cost rented hardware to do some Round-Robin DNS load balancing.

So, in summary, if you're going to use lighttpd, use it on Linux.

It seems like feast or famine time as this is the second blog post today but I found something else I don''t want to lose track of. Clustering is now part of any enterprise web application solution. We have worked on clusters of all different types, colors, flavors etc. As a matter of historical note the one that sticks in my mind above others was at the 2000 DevCon in Washington DC when I assisted Frank DeRienzo in torturing 30 or so attendees in his session on setting up clusters of CF Servers using ClusterCats. Talk about boot camp!

To the point of the blog posting, there is an interesting initiative from the Linux Community to use Linux as a platform for enterprise clustering, information etc can be found here. I also notice that someone has created a port of this to FreeBSD.

I think the name they chose for this is quite intriguing, the Linux Virtual Server Project. Our typical thoughts of a virtual server is that of a server(s) within a physical server with its own O/S etc. The meaning here is of several servers which to the end user appear as a single point. Typical clustering of course but i just think the name they chose is interesting.

THIS ISSUE WILL APPLY TO MANY COLDFUSION MX INSTALLs - Security monitoring company Secunia have identified two security bugs in the Sub Java Runtime (JRE-JVM). JRE is part of Sun''s Java 2 Platform Standard Edition, or J2SE. Both flaws affect J2SE 5.0 and 5.0 Update 1 for Windows, Solaris and Linux. The general JRE flaw also affects J2SE 1.4.2_07 and earlier 1.4.2 releases for those operating systems, Sun said.

The full article is here.

SELinux or .Security Enhanced Linux. as it is properly known was developed in a joint effort by the National Security Agency and the Linux Community, the reasons are of course fairly obvious and don''t need to be stated here. It makes setting up Linux for Server tasks marginally more difficult but like anything once understood, it becomes part of routine Sys Admin tasks.

Steven Erat has posted many good articles for us all, he has one aimed directly at installing and configuring ColdFusion MX for Red Hat Fedora when SELinux is installed, the article is here.

Steven also pointed out an article on Red Hat''s web site which is a good explanation of SELinux, you can find that one here.

Novell announces the availability of the latest edition of the Novell Linux Desktop powered by SUSE Linux 9. At first glance this looks like a worthy progression along the path of an alternative desktop for Microsoft Windows. This is aimed at enterprises and comes in two major version types, one with expanded administrative privileges to enable enterprise-wide deployment and management. The price-point looks reasonable at $50.00 per copy.

As an interesting addendum to this, the Los Angeles Times today had a Business Section front page article about Firefox and the imminent release of version 1.0. They state that Firefox has around 10 Million users worldwide, "small potatoes" in comparison to IE. Nevertheless, significant and growing.

Here is the Novell Announcement

LinuxISO.org has many different distributions of Linux for download. It looks like a definitive single source for all the distributions I am familiar with including: -

• College
• Debian
• Fedora
• Free BSD
• Gentoo
• Knoppix
• Lycoris
• Mandrake
• Slackware
• SuSE
• TSL
• turbolinux
• Yellow Dog

Check out the site here.

This is sort of old news but as one of our clients did not know about it, I thought it worthy of a blog post. There have been issues with running Verity on ColdFusion MX on many Linux systems. Macromedia issued a hot fix for this back in May 2004 which allows Verity to run on Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, 8, 9; Red Hat AS and ES 2.1, 3.0; Suse 7.2, 7.3, 8.0.

The hot fix can be found here.

Well that''s in my opinion as I look at some numbers in today''s LA Times article regarding the settlement accord between Microsoft and Sun. I think it highlights something we don''t think of often or perhaps you do.

The LA times article highlights the fact that Sun has lost $3.8 Billion in the past 18 months; that Sun''s business has fallen by 40% as a result of things like the steady incursion of Linux as the Unix O/S.

Also mentioned in the article is the fact that Microsoft has $53 Billion in cash and marketable assets.

I came into computing from a business management background and when I see numbers like that, particularly those relating to Sun''s performance they make me shudder for the future of Java. If Sun continues to rely heavily (almost exclusively) on revenue from the sales of Solaris and their server hardware I honestly don''t think that they have a particular rosy future. I don''t see anything stopping the ongoing erosion of their business from clients moving to Linux based systems.

Rob Rohan just announced the release of a plug-in for ColdFusion in Eclipse the popular IDE used widely in Java development. The plug in covers Eclipse versions 2x and 3 and it works on Mac, Linux, and Windows (with jre1.4).

cfeclipse ColdFusion plug in for Eclipse

I posted the other day about setting up a new server install for some new projects Webapper have and some of the woes we were facing in doing that. In short I could not get Win2k to install on two of the boxes but the BSOD errors were different and misleading and also somewhat random. What it turned out to be was faulty RAM, I am somewhat ashamed of myself after hundreds of installs from Win NT, through Linux and Win2k but what really threw me here was that two servers both had faulty RAM. I never thought that could be the case. In the course of the trials I turned to a neat little free utility called Memtest86. I had used it before but see that there is now a CD version (in addition to a diskette version) also which can be handy sometimes. Within a few minutes of starting the tests I realized we had faulty RAM on both of these two new systems.

Lesson learned for me, run Memtest86 before anything else not after!