Our friends over at Tēvolution were written up on the incouraged communications blog today. Check out the post at http://www.incouraged.com/2011/06/08/tevolution-authentici-tea/
The post outlines their business and how the application we built supports their business goals. There are also some screenshots of the application in action.
If you haven’t already, check out their site at http://www.trackyourimpact.com/
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 ended up doing the following:
After these updates we were able to move them from their two servers (8 gig and 4 gig) to a single server(4 gig). We have also reduced load times significantly. Their server loads dropped from 4-5 on average to 0.25. Recently they had an article on the Huffington Post and didn’t have any problems handling the 4x traffic spike they saw. At points we were seeing according to ChartBeat over 600 people on the site at once. The single server handled this without problems.
The updated infrastructure will give them a savings of about 75% from their previous setup. It also gives the users on the site a much faster and reliable experience.
We look forward to helping Her Campus with their continuing expansion of their site and user base!
Recently one of our clients decided to white label their product. With that we had to setup the server to use multiple IPs as the application requires you communicate over SSL and we needed a SSL per domain. We did not want to buy a UCC(a multiple domain) SSL certificate as right now it wasn’t required for the small number of white labels. After we added the additional IP we had the issue that the application which connects to off site MySQL servers, was sometimes going over the new IPs and then getting denied accessed.
We knew the solution was with iptables so after some digging and testing, we came up with the following command. This command we use will redirect all traffic that is not over port 443 (in this example) to go out over the ‘YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY’ address that is about to go out over the XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX ip.
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp ! --dport 443 -s XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX -j SNAT --to-source YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY
We didn’t see any examples of this clearly defined (after a quick google that is), on the web, so hopefully this will save you time from having to read through the iptables documentation.
I was working on an application earlier today that required allowing a user to upload a large file (several hundred MB) which would eventually be stored on Amazon S3. After reviewing the requirements, I realized it made sense to just upload the file directly to S3 instead of having to first stage the file on a server and then use PHP to push the file to S3.
Amazon has a nice walk through of using a plain HTML form to upload a file directly to S3 here.
I had all ready been using SWFUpload to upload files to the server so I decided to look into using it to uploading directly to S3. After some head banging, I finally got it to work – here’s the quick n dirty.
Thats it! It’s pretty straight forward once you have things going. As an FYI, you can put SWFUpload into “debug” mode by adding debug: true as a property to the initialization object. You can also debug the responses from Amazon by using a packet sniffer like Wireshark.
You probably want to make this file a little less permissive. More details here. Also note, there are differences in the implementation of the file between various versions of Flash player.
The HMAC signature MUST be calculated on the server because it uses your S3 secret. You MUST keep that value secret in order to maintain the security of your S3 buckets. I’m using Don Schonknecht’s S3 PHP library to calculate the HMAC signatures but you could just as easily do it in straight PHP.
Earlier today we launched Boston Built in collaboration with our friends at Bocoup, UpStatement, and SignedOn
Basically, Boston built allows you to “represent” by either adding a graphic logo or a 1×1 tracking pixel to your site via Javascript. Then, the bostonbuilt.org site will pick you up and list your favicon along side the other sites that are including the tracking code.
BostInnovation has a nice write up and a poll at The ‘Built in Boston’ initiative.
Happy Friday!