OK so having been mucking around with nginx, I thought it was time for a quick comparison. I duplicated the brain and created a second brain.  They are both on virtual servers with 2GB RAM – OK they are not identical platforms one is on Digital Ocean and the other on one of our own virtual servers – but as far as can be done easily they are the same.

I than ran both through GTMetrix and webpagetest and the results are show below:

In both tests the second brain was quicker, and noticeably on the webpagetest the time to first byte is much quicker.

I’ll probably keep mucking about with this over time, and I may well move this 100days blog to the same server as brain2 to see if there is an improvement there as well.

OK – time for security – played around with SSL settings – for nginx and apache for better performance – reduced the number of cyphers used.  Looked at changing ISPConfig templates for nginx vhost configs – there may well be a blog post coming out of it.

Trying to get wordfence falcon cache working with nginx – having some issues still

More work on the nginx side of things and getting wordpress running properly under it.

Started investigation using nginx instead of apache – apparently better performance etc.  Installed in on my second server.

Oh the joys of upgrades!

On Friday the GreatGothNinja and I decided that as we were offered the upgrade to Oneiric Ocelot on our office systems to take the bull by its horns and go ahead.  The upgrade itself was smooth, however getting the desktops into a working state was somewhat more problematic.

The GGN has now moved over to using KDE as the release version of gnome has caused all sorts of problems with typing rates on his system, mine on the other-hand did not suffer the same problems, and I am now using unity.

Both of us have decided that it is time to say goodbye to tweetdeck as it has just started causing more and more problems, being a memory hog, not behaving when you scroll up and down columns, and you can also add the fact that Adobe have decided not to develop the Air system any more for linux means that the chances of it continuing to work are slim.  Finding another app to do the same job has been interesting as both of us have tried gwibber with the same result.  It just does not work.  You can set up your accounts but it never displays any updates.  The app of choice is now yoono, which seems to be OK, although we have had issues with that as well this morning.

One other are of problems has been MySQL Workbench which is a fantastic tool for MySQL administration of servers and database design – it query browser leaves a lot to be desired, and navicat does a good job there, however there are some issues here too.  The splash screen does not disappear and it looks like it is hung, however using alt-F4 clears that and the app starts as normal, in so far as the admin tools work but the query browser doesn’t.

A patch has been released to fix these issues, but no binaries as yet.

The MySQL workbench blog has build instructions for it however there are a few changes that need to be made. First install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake \
libtool libzip-dev libxml2-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libglade2-dev \
libgtkmm-2.4-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libmysqlclient15-dev uuid-dev \
liblua5.1-dev libpcre3-dev g++ libglade2-dev libgnome2-dev \
python-pexpect libboost-dev libsqlite3-dev python-dev \
libgnome-keyring-dev libctemplate-dev libxrender-dev \
libxcomposite-dev libgtkglext1-dev libxinerama-dev

This differs due to Oneiric not having libglitz-dev nor libglitz-glx-dev which have been replaced by libxrender-dev libxcomposite-dev libgtkglext1-dev and libxinerama-dev by the looks of things.

Also the autogen entries appear to have problems due to double hyphens – it should read:

./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/

Just for good measure, here is a click-able link for the patch and the MySQL workbench site as well.

Workbench home

Patch

patch the code with:

patch -p0 < 5.2.35-ubuntu_11_10_compile_fix.patch

Enjoy