PHP

I wanted to install the mbstring PHP extension on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. But to my surprise, it wasn't there:

That's because the package is in the RHEL Server Optional repository.

I went into RHN and enabled the repository:

After doing yum update I could do yum install php-mbstring with no problems.

Just replace the stock PHP with one from the IUS Community project.

Done!

Matt Nuzum, the webmaster of ubuntu.com, invited me to speak at the Des Moines Web Geeks meeting last night. The venue, Impromptu Studios, was a bit hard to find. There were no signs for Impromptu Studios, but after lurking in dark alleyways for a while I eventually discovered what should have been obvious from the beginning: enter the furniture store with the "Closed" sign on the front and go up the stairs past the disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."

The group was great and we talked for about an hour and half about bottlenecks and optimization. I even went home with a Django book!

Since this was a diverse group I tried to talk about things that everyone has to deal with (bottlenecks for storage, network, memory and CPU) rather than anything Drupal-specific.

As promised, last night's slides: Performance, Scalability on the Server Side (PDF, 1MB).

Here's how to install APC on RHEL5.

Check for the apc section in your phpinfo() page. If it's not there:

SELinux is preventing the extension from loading, I'll bet. Let's check:

Let's view the security contexts for our PHP extensions:

Yup. Notice how the security context is missing (it's tmp_t for apc.so). Let's fix that.

Now let's try again:

Yay!

P.S. On x86_64, apc.so is in /usr/lib64/php/modules.