Jan on Tour
See me (Jan) live and in colour at the MySQL UC 2006 in April 24-27 in Santa Clara, CA, USA and two month later again in Chicago, IL, USA at the RailsConf 2006
development¶
Serving Images From A Database
Kris tells you why this usually a bad idea in his article Serving Images From A Database
flv streaming with lighttpd
1.4.11 got a new module for streaming Flash movie files called mod_flv_streaming. This module allows you to seek in FLV files using the high performance infrastructure of lighttpd.
Patches for 1.4.10
Pending patches for the current release:
- mod_deflate for compressing dynamic content
- mod_extforward to extract the Host from X-forwarded-for
- the mysqlvhost patches for mod_fastcgi
They will be check in the next ‘feature’ release. If you want to try them out now and test them, feel free to contact the authors of the patches directly.
In The News
I grep through the referer log from time to time to see where lighty is mentioned on the net.
This week I got attracted by these links:
- Jifty and Perl6 are the topic at pugs.blogs.com which also rushed through the planetsix.perl.org
- Duncan Davidson publish a series of articles about lighttpd and rails Virtual Hosting Rails Applications with LightTPD and Deploying Rails with LightTPD
- Steve Jobs presented the MacBookPro and macrumorslive used lighttpd to report about it live. justaddwater.dk talks about it is a good idea to use lighttpd for this job.
- On www.vmunix.com was a article about past, present and future of FastCGI, SCGI and CGI
- Kevin Worthington published a new lighty on Windows without Cygwin package for lighttpd 1.4.8
- the.taoofmac.com likes the webdav support of lighttpd and also mentions ipoddisk
- hivelogic.com provides launchd support for lighty for MacOSX users
That’s it for this week.
simplify your configfiles with includes
Or should it be named “virtual hosting made easy”? Anyway. If your vhosting setup looks a bit more complext like having different options (static only, php support, pre-installed rails apps, …) but a similar setup for each you can’t use the vhosting modules and have to write everything by hand. But there is rescue thanks to includes and variables.
Optimizing Lighty for high-concurrent, large-file downloads
In lighttpd 1.4.6 we have added some modifications for sites which have handle some 100 files in parallel with size of more than 100Mb each.
The problem in earlier releases was that lighttpd had to wait until the disk had seeked to the right place, read a few 100 kbyte to send it out. And this for each request as this scenario was completly trashing the disk-buffering. The IO-wait went sky-high and we were completly bound to the disk-io.
Mission failed: You got spotted
Last month have been very impressive for lighty. Every month I was waiting for the statistics gathered by NetCraft about the usage from web-server software on the net. We all know that Apache has 70% of the market, but as every month I check the detailed reports too see where lighty is now: place 30, 19000 installations.
And somehow this information got leaked to our last few missing distributor as I got mail from Zak (Ubuntu), darix (SuSE) and Ernest (Apple).
Improved Upload handling
Finally,
this is the third attempt from my side to solve the upload problem (buffering the full content in memory)
lighttpd goes scons
In my daily work at MySQL I added scons as the build-system for a cross-platform, multi-language project and am very satisfied with the results. We have Unix, Windows and MacOS X as build-platforms and Java, C, PHP and Perl as programming languages and all works nicely together in a Python written build-system.
lighttpd goes now the same way, solving the nasty autotools dependencies.