MacPorts Leopard + Apache 2.2.17 + PHP 5.3.5 + WordPress 3.0.4 + 1 million or so users per month issue

[Betty Bronner]

Yes, it is weird, but that is what was happening.  The problem only showed up 
with MacPorts Apache/PHP and only seemed to happen randomly.  We reversed each 
change one by one until we were left with just the Apache/PHP switch.  The 
random RSS feed problem went away as soon as we switched back to Apple Apache 
(2.2.13) and Entropy PHP (5.3.0).

This morning I remembered having difficulty getting MacPorts to initially 
compile some of the early dependencies until I found and installed the latest 
XCode for Leopard (3.1.4?).  It successfully built the first few ports but had a 
warning at the start of the whole process that said that certain ports wouldn't 
like the version of XCode  I was building with (3.1.2?  It was whatever version 
that Leopard came with) and eventually it hit one of those ports and stopped 
building.  I upgraded XCode at that point and then the build continued where it 
left off without any further difficulties.  I've since uninstalled MacPorts 
(sudo port uninstall installed) and then rebuilt everything from scratch but we 
haven't tried those binaries in production.  So it is tempting to try switching 
again but I'm more eager to try nginx at this point.  Now that I think about it, 
mixing binaries from multiple XCode versions might be problematic but I figured 
at the time that since everything successfully built that there wouldn't be any 
issues.  Nothing said that I needed to start over, so I didn't.

- Betty





________________________________
From: Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>
To: Betty Bronner <bettybronner at yahoo.com>
Cc: macports-users at lists.macosforge.org
Sent: Mon, January 31, 2011 6:59:18 PM
Subject: Re: MacPorts Leopard + Apache 2.2.17 + PHP 5.3.5 + WordPress 3.0.4 + 1 
million or so users per month issue

On Jan 31, 2011, at 19:27, Betty Bronner wrote:

> We've unfortunately had to revert to the Apple Apache and Entropy PHP for the 
>time being.  The problems were happening too frequently.  Of course, that means 
>we are now back to square one.
> 
> MacPorts is pretty much a last-ditch effort to try to continue to use Leopard 
>to host the site.  We're evaluating all options but we're running out of them 
>very quickly.  I've tried building the software myself from source but it 
>typically just breaks somewhere halfway through the build and I give up.  
>Everyone on the Internet is all "Linux or bust!" with no support or love for OS 
>X Server.  Plus, Apple recently terminated the OS X Server product line.

Well, they discontinued the Xserve server hardware line, and replaced it with 
the Mac Pro Server and Mac mini Server hardware lines. The Mac OS X Server 
software remains unchanged.

There's no reason why a Mac OS X web server shouldn't work exactly as well as a 
Linux web server, but of course I realize that doesn't help you while you're 
experiencing these problems, until we identify the cause of them and fix it.

But, you say that these problems only occurred with MacPorts Apache and PHP, and 
do not occur with Apple Apache and Entropy PHP? Or is the problem just less 
frequent now? That's interesting... though I admit I don't know how it helps us 
get closer to a diagnosis.


> I found this:
> 
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/26039
> 
> But obviously that isn't included yet or it would show up in the variants 
list.

I suppose I should just add it, and then improve it (move all the SAPIs to 
separate ports -- #19091) later when I have time to sort that out.


> nginx is the new hotness - powering 6% of the top 1 million web servers - and 
>will probably stay the new hotness as long as they don't bloat the default 
>out-of-the-box server like Apache.  Unfortunately, it is still a rather 
>experimental server.  Everyone's been recommending php-fpm with nginx.  I got an 
>idea I'll try tomorrow and see if I can make it work - maybe nginx with php5 
>+fastcgi +pear might work.


      
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