Best hardware / operating system / network ?

Developers Installing PHP / Apache / IIS / Environment
#1

Hi,

I develop scriptcase application on my webserver that is located in a datacenter outside my office.

Everything works fine. Waiting times are a bit long. Scriptcase speeds up development time so I have no complaints. But I would like to reduce the last waiting moments.

What’s the best possible hardware/os/network combination to shorten the delays in generating applications?

  • Windows/Linux?
  • Browser and scriptcase on same machine?
  • Local network different pc’s for browser and scriptcase?
  • Huge processor for scriptcase so the generation of an application will be faster?

What are your experiences regarding generation speed of applications?

#2

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

Here are my suggestions:

For the hosting server: Make sure that the host is not hosting thousands of sites on a server.
http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/

I have seen Godaddy in excess of 10,000 sites on a server. It was taking 30 sec to 2 min to serve a page. Hardware is so cheap these days, a dedicated server very easy to setup.

As for your question on development PC, here is my setup:

I prefer Linux. After 25 years in Windows, I was tired of same problems. I have friends that love Win7, so who knows. This is preference.
FireFox using Firebug plugin for debugging. None better.
I have my LAMP server (not LLAMP) and SC on my main PC, it runs fine.
My PC is an I7 with 16 gig RAM, dual 9600. I am running am64 Linux (needed for > 4 gig RAM)
I have Windows in a VirtualBox for the days I need it.

This is a great setup for me. I have used this for just over a year now.

After my upgrade to 5.1, I once compiled my 80 app project in 45 seconds. Single apps are usually compiled in 1-3 seconds.

Regards,
Scott.

#3

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

Thanks Scott,

So you develop on your local machine with Linux. Generation time is fast indeed.

What Linux do you use? ubuntu?

Regards,

Martin

#4

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

Yes, I have Ubuntu 9.10 amd64. I used to use Fedora, but I started telling new users about the ease of Ubuntu and I installed it so I could help support them and I really liked the DEB package manager more than RPM.

I thought about a dedicated PC, but with this speed why increase my electric bill even more. I am stumbling over PC’s as is.

Once 5.3 is fully supported, I will jump to 10.x (those d*mn zend developers need to get the led out. I guess 5.3 snuck up on their *ss)

I forgot to mention, dual monitors at least … that just makes me work faster, not the computer <bg>

Regards,
Scott.

#5

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

Thanks, this will save me time.

#6

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

I installed Scriptcase on windows 7 and didn’t noticed performance improvements. So I keep on developing remotely through internet.

  • Chrome browser very fast on Ajax.
  • Scriptcase 5 installed on Linux webserver
  • Cabled connection to internet (21 ms download, 1,16 ms upload )

I’am satisfied with the performance now.

Any further suggestions to improve the performance are welcome off course.

Regards,
Martin

#7

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

I believe your next option would be to look at alternate Apache server options that process PHP faster and use events vs threads and provide better memory management.

-lighttpd
-litespeed
-nginx
-Zues

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/17/alternative-web-servers-compared-lighttpd-nginx-litespeed-and-zeus/
http://turnkeye.com/blog/2010/04/nginx-vs-litespeed-test-magento/

There are plenty of posts regarding these Apache forks.

Regards,
Scott.

#8

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

For better performance we are using debian with litespeed.
ScriptCase dont use lots of memory, processor is more important on cgi application.

Others hosting that we indicate is www.taghost.com.br … is pretty fast.

#9

Re: Best hardware / operating system / network ?

I noticed that application generation time goes up when using more fields on a form.

I moved scriptcase to a virtualbox under windows7 (ubuntu 9.04). The machine has a powerfull Processor. Besides that it runs on my own network. It indeed uses not much memory I noticed in “top”.

The processor peeks when generating an application with lot of fields.

The nice thing about the virtualbox is that I can take snapshots before messing up the installation :-).

Best regards.
Martin