Author: Matt Daum

Recently I was working on a project where we had a page which loads tons of data from numerous sources. I decided after a while that we wanted to AJAX each section of data so that the page would load a bit quicker. After splitting up the requests and sending them asyncronously, there was little improvement. I thought at first it may be due to the fact we were pinging a single API for most of the data multiple times, that wasn’t it. Maybe it was a browser limit? Nope was still far below the 6 requests most allow. I setup xdebug and kcachegrind and to my surprise it was the session_start() that was taking the most time on the requests.

I looked around the web for a while trying to figure out what in the world was going on. It turns out that PHP’s default session_start will block future session_starts for the same session until the session is closed. This is because the default method uses a file on the filesystem which it locks until you close it. If you want more information on this and how to close it you can read a bit more here.

We switched over to database based sessions and it fixed it. In symfony 1.4 the default session storage uses the file system, however switching over to http://trac.symfony-project.org/browser/branches/1.4/lib/storage/sfPDOSessionStorage.class.php">sfPDOSessionStorage is very easy and quick.

We just wanted to wish everyone a great holiday season. We hope everyone brings in the new year with a bang!

See you next year, Setfive

Update: Amazon has now made it so you can set expiration times on objects in S3, see more here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1303

Recently I was working on a project where we upload backups to Amazon S3. I wanted to keep the files around for a certain duration and remove any files that were older than a month. We use the s3cmd utility for most of our command line based calls to S3, however it doesn’t have a built in “delete any file in this bucket that is older than 30 days” function. After googling around a bit, we found some python based scripts, however there wasn’t any that was a simple bash script that would do what I was looking for. I whipped this one up real quick, it may not be the best looking but it gets the job done:

#!/bin/bash

# Usage: ./deleteOld "bucketname" "30 days"

s3cmd ls s3://$1 | while read -r line;
  do
    createDate=`echo $line|awk {'print $1" "$2'}`
    createDate=`date -d"$createDate" +%s`
    olderThan=`date -d"-$2" +%s`
    if [[ $createDate -lt $olderThan ]]
      then 
        fileName=`echo $line|awk {'print $4'}`
        echo $fileName
        if [[ $fileName != "" ]]
          then
            s3cmd del "$fileName"
        fi
    fi
  done;

Symfony2 was released this past Thursday.  This marks a huge advancement in the framework with tons of new features, better programming patterns, and much better performance.  Symfony2 is now the most popular PHP project on GitHub and contributors are helping better it each day.

Since we are so excited for this release, we are going to take on one small free project for the person or company who submits the best idea and reason for their project.  We’ll be picking the free project within one week of today. Shoot us an email with your project and reason you’d like it done for free.

Congrats to the entire Symfony2 team and we look forward to helping out with it!

Over the past month we’ve been working with Her Campus (HerCampus.com) to help them with issues they were having. When we started talking with Her Campus, we learned that they had different types of issues ranging from some Drupal based ones to actual server level problems. They were having some trouble keeping up to traffic demands, and if a traffic spike occurred their current infrastructure wasn’t sufficient.

After looking at their setup, we noted quite a few areas in which we could improve performance. The old setup was a fairly standard setup, a frontend server using Apache to handle HTTP requests and then a second server which was their MySQL database server. The servers were a 4 gig and 8 gig server respectively.

It was clear Apache was adding unneeded overhead, and wasn’t the best solution for them. We revamped their setup significantly. We switched them to Nginx + PHP-FPM. We immediately saw great improvement on from this change alone. However we wanted to get them to a single server, and to be able to handle traffic spikes with a single server.

We look forward to helping Her Campus with their continuing expansion of their site and user base!