Monitoring bandwidth usage with vnStat under CentOS 5 Linux
vnStat is a very simple utility that can track the amount of bandwidth used by your web server. It works by monitoring the received and transmitted bytes counters of your network interface and logging the data in a database. In this post I look at how to install vnStat and a web-based front end on a CentOS 5 Linux web server.
Reduce CPU load with Alternative PHP Cache
PHP is by far the most popular scripting language for dynamic web pages but it is not the most efficient language. Each time a PHP page is accessed it has to be:
- Parsed by the interpreter
- Converted into intermediary format called opcode
- Converted into machine code for your server's CPU to execute it
If the same script is accessed 100 times these steps are repeated a 100 times. To avoid this repetition and waste of server resources you can use the Alternative PHP Cache or APC.
APC is a PECL extension that caches frequently accessed PHP files code in opcode format for faster execution thereby reducing CPU load on your web server. In this guide I write about how to install and configure APC.
The cost of setting up a small business website
Multiple websites with drupal
Drupal is a popular content management system that offers an excellent mix of ease of use and flexibility. If I were to rank drupal, wordpress and serendipity in terms of flexibility then drupal would be number one followed by serendipity and lastly wordpress.
Drupal allows you to use a single copy to power multiple sites. This saves you disk space because you have just a single copy of drupal files that are being used by multiple websites. It also makes maintanence easier since you only have to update a single copy of drupal. In this post I look at how you can get additional sites to work with your drupal installation.
Squid reverse proxy Apache on centos 4.5
