Host move complete…
Completed my long move today over to Linode from Slicehost. A few reasons for the switch – the main two being the price (I’m now on a Linode 560, which is 560mb of RAM, vs the 512 at Slicehost for the same price). They also give a 10% discount for pre-paying for a year, or 15% for two years. But you’re not stuck in a contract. Sweet deal there. The other reason was that Linode doesn’t force you to go on x64, so you’re not wasting memory needlessly to the OS. The box “feels” faster, probably because I have a lot more free RAM since I chose to go on 32bit. No swap usage so far (alot of room available), with identical set ups. My slice was constantly using swap. My ping times are also certainly lower. So far so good. I got to also chose the data center, over at The Planet in Dallas. The Linode control panel is also “meatier”, compared to the Slicehost manager. Linode gives you 24-hour and 30-day usage graphs, with averages and stats on CPU, network, and disk IO. Really useful information. The only downside is that the image backups at Linode are in “beta”, but doesn’t matter so much to be since I use an outside backup service anyway.
I also did a fresh upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”, which is what I was waiting on to make the switch. Went very smoothly; I stayed with nginx, except this time, instead of using the php-fcgi, I decided to try out the php-fpm route. It was a bit of a hassle, and took the better part of a day, though I got it working in the end. But that’s because it was my first time doing it. I will have a post on that soon. Basically, I installed the Ubuntu 5.2.10 packages, and then compiled php-fpm against that source, which fixed a few issues I was having with configs not getting picked up when I compiled it against the vanilla PHP source. So far so good, running with APC and memcache going.
I think I will next try to compile PHP 5.3 from source, and add PHP-FPM into it, though I feel like waiting for a package. Perhaps a project for next weekend, but definitely something to try on a virtual machine first. I was reading a few bugs that APC was a bit wonky on 5.3, so I might wait until 5.3.1, and that Suhosin is also a bit sketch. Though, it might be some good motivation to try out XCache. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed that 5.3 wasn’t included by default in 9.10. I was trying to find out when it might be, but I think it could be a while. At least this time around, I took real detailed notes on what I did, from start to finish. I’m not so afraid of compiling this time around. For instance, nginx, I compared the layout of the Ubuntu repository copy, and mimicked that with –prefix and the –sbin-path configure options. It’s just convenient having the “sudo apt-get upgrade” command. Ubuntu also made it real easy in terms of dependencies. I remember a few years ago trying to compile stuff, and it was always a nightmare. I think that’s what scared me away from it, but it was pretty painless this time around.
Other updates – phpVMS, a lot of progress, thanks to everyone for helping test, fixing alot of bugs. Made alot of core changes too, which I’ll detail in the release post – hopefully in a few weeks. Same with vaCentral, I’m trying to get them both out at the same time. But thanks to everyone testing, I’ve been able to nail a lot of bugs. It’s looking much better than it did a few weeks ago.
Anyway, I’m fried. Time for a break. And, Happy Halloween!
