Santiago Lizardo

The common infrastructure of servers for all my websites

In this post I’ll explain you how I structured the components of almost all my websites.

- Programming language: PHP 5.x + eAccelerator (to boost the performance)

• It’s a great programming language with huge features
• The times to edit, test, and if it’s necessary, repair scripts written in PHP are really low
• It’s well supported by the most popular hosting companies

- Database server: MySQL 5.x

• All what you may need in a SQL engine
• Also well supported by hosting companies

- Web server #1: lighttpd 1.x

I use this web server to serve the static content, such as stylesheets, javascripts, images, videos, etc… Doing this, I save a lot of bandwidth (compressing this content), cpu usage (the footprint for this web server is minimal)

- Web server #2: Apache HTTPD 2.2.x

For all the other requests is this web server who delivers the content (mainly dynamically generated by PHP, Python, or Perl).

- Application server: Jetty 6.x

When I need a particular functionality not supported (or partially supported) by PHP, then I go to Java. And due to the limitations on the RAM memory of my server, I need a small, low consuming app server like this one.

- Operating system: GNU/Linux (flavour: openSUSE)

Eventually, when a web site needs an intensive CPU process it’s better to split the main process (the HTTP request) and the task process into two. Running a task within the web server can be really expensive and depending on the restrictions of the web server, the request can be aborted before finished.

I’m preparing a diagram to attach to this post in the next days.