Cloud Computing is the most hottest area of Information Technology today.  Companies that moved to Cloud Computing significantly reduced their costs, and they could concentrate on their core business. Once you are plugged into the cloud, you have access to thousands of new applications that can help your business, many of them free or low cost. You never have to buy servers again. You never have to worry about backups and disaster recovery. This article provides you essential guidelines to move your application to Amazon EC3 Cloud Computing. Full article (533 words) »

nginx [engine x] is a high quality, light footprint (much ligher than Apache HTTPD), high performance HTTP server and mail proxy server written by Igor Sysoev. nginx is distributed under BSD license unlike its competitor Lighttpd. We are progressively transferring our sites over to nginx. Today when I had to restart the server, I realized (after few hours) with horror that we had forgot to add the script to start nginx automatically after reboot. When you want any command to execute everytime after a reboot you should add it to /etc/rc.local. The commands in rc.local are executed *after* all the other init scripts. To automatically start nginx as well as fastcgi on reboot you should add the following lines to /etc/rc.local at the end -

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We now have our phpBB forum running on Nginx web server, a high quality and significantly better performing web server than Apache HTTPD. Soem of the challenges we faced were:

1. We use nice permalinks in the forum so there are lots of apache httpd rewrite rules in .htaccess files which had to be converted to nginx format.
2. Additionally we also had to configure it for a virtual hosting setup where the same IP address (server) is shared by multiple websites.

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We did a performance comparison of Angsuman's Translator Plugin Pro with our competitor. This is purely a performance comparison. For the purpose of this comparison we ignored glaring differences like we provide tons of additional features and functionality, full support, actively maintained, unlimited upgrades and that we support translation from each of 14 languages to 13 other languages and provide enormous customizality for each. So let's get down to numbers only.

Hardware

Pentium 4 3.8 GHz with Hyperthreading (enabled) and 1GB RAM.

Software

Operating System

Linux - Fedora Core 4

Benchmarking Software

ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev

Web Server

Apache 2.0

Test Condition

The tests were done with caching enabled for both plugins but with cache cleared. Test results are averaged over 100 iterations. The server load was minimal before the test as idenitfied by top.
Note: Translator Plugin Pro caching technology

Limitations
The testing process was in the same machine so higher concurrency number is likely to slow things down as the testing threads contend for the same CPU and resources.

Conclusion
Translator Plugin Pro displays consistently higher performance (read ~ 10 x faster in normal load) over its competitor. More importantly Translator Plugin Pro had 0% failure rate in our tests while our competition had over 91% failure rate. In my book when 9 out of 10 requests fail that software ceases to be a competition, you decide.

The icing on the cake for me personally was when we realized that the translated pages served by Translator Plugin Pro (avg: 151 ms) are around three times faster than normal untranslated pages (avg: 414 ms).