Linux a go-go!

[David]

You may notice that the forum is now much faster and more responsive than it was just before Christmas. The reason for this improvement is that I have moved the websitearchitecture.co.uk domain to a Linux (http://www.linux.org/) server (Linux is the name of the operating system). For those who like to know these things, the server is running the Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com/) flavour of Linux and using Apache (http://www.apache.org/) server software.

The move was prompted by the rather sluggish nature of the forum under Windows. Before Christmas the forum was running on a Windows 2003 server and I had become concerned by the poor speed, which sometimes resulted in a "Fatal Error" as the PHP (http://www.php.net/) Hypertext Preprocessor timed out. It seems that Linux and Apache form the best/most efficient (and fastest) combination for delivering PHP based pages (PHP is the scripting language used by the forum).

My tests show that the forum is now between 3 and 5 times faster than under Windows. Obviously, this is something worth taking into account if you are considering building PHP based sites.

Those of you on Broadband will notice a small difference but those connecting to the internet over dial-up will notice a massive difference - speed of connection is a major factor when rendering PHP generated pages.

All comments and observations welcome.

This topic refers to the old forum

[francis]

I did notice on Christmas eve that the whole site was down, so that explains it :). A quick 404 check (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/lalala) shows that the IIS 'page not found' page no longer exists. Now all you need is your own 404 page - a doddle to set up using an Apache .htaccess file.

I've just ordered O'Reilly's Apache The Definitive Guide (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596002033/qid=1072528796/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_3_2/202-4236794-0362205) as it looks good and I may need to start tweaking things on a couple of servers that I use.

It is noticably faster on a 56k dialup (I must change this!)

[David]

Sadly, Fasthosts do not support the use of .htaccess for custom 404s :(. It's a security thing (apparently). However, I am using .htaccess for the URL Security of this forum (that IS allowed).

For those interested, see the Custom 404 Error Page (http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/accessibility/custom404error.html) tutorial for details of how this could work.

[francis]

How strange. I wonder what the security problem is? It's not as though custom 404 pages aren't all over the Web (a 404 page is geek/nerd speak for 'page not found' - it's an error code that is part of the HTTP specification). Will Fasthosts explain?

[francis]

Ah, and here's an example of the difference between Linux and Windows: case sensitivity. For those that don't know, in a Windows environment it doesn't matter what case you type your links in: www.mysite.com/HELLO/ is the same as www.mysite.com/hello/ or www.mysite.com/HeLlO/.

David - your image links are broken (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/forum/index.php?v=stopic&c=5&locked=1). You need to replace the 'Watson' with 'watson' in your links :). This is the only page I've checked.

[David]

Weird. Not me guv. The raw message text says "watson" but the link displays "Watson" (scratches head). There's no doubt it's a Windows/Unix problem. Editing the offending posts resolved the problem but... Weird