UnixWars

I have talked previously about Cherokee’s MySQL Database Bridge, so I won’t be repeating myself. Check the information about the Cherokee handler module and the recipe for MySQL balancing on our main site if you are interested.

Besides being the fastest implementation of its kind, it is really easy to use and offers a lot of scalability advantages.

For those of you using PHP we’ve finally pushed upstream a wrapper I wrote for this feature. It should facilitate the use of the MySQL Database Bridge: the PHP-MySQL API has been replicated and can be found under dbslayer/mysql_wrap.php in Cherokee’s source tree. It should provide an easy to use method of benefiting from the advantages offered by Cherokee without having to modify your applications. This will definitely be in our next release, so give it a try and tell us about it! ;)

I’ve been writing a wrapper for Cherokee’s MySQL load balancer to transparently replace PHP’s MySQL functions and provide connection pooling and database balancing at absolutely no cost. And I encountered a problem wanting to override those built-in functions.

It looks like the override_function() has a bug that prevents from using it to override two or more functions, since it issues this error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare __overridden__()

Judging by the C code for PHP’s override_function() function, instead of hardcoding the overriden function name it was planed to generate random names, but for reasons unknown to me this never happened.

Anyway, I can’t believe the fix for this is so simple and yet the solution didn’t appear in PHP’s excellent online documentation. It had me lost for a while, but it’s as simple as renaming the overriden function!! This is from the wrapper I mentioned, that will be distributed with Cherokee shortly:

foreach ($substs as $func => $ren_func) {
    override_function($func, $args[$func], "return $substs[$func];");
    rename_function("__overridden__", $ren_func);
}

You know those times when you stumble upon a good idea and think it is plain genius?

Alvaro told me about it this morning and I just had to share it with everybody. This is what you will find if you visit http://apache-es.org, a community in Spanish built to talk about Apache and system administration.

The “aviso” part is a warning:

Apache-es.org, the only Q&A site about Apache that is running Cherokee!

As I said: plain genius!

Yesterday we reached yet another milestone in Cherokee’s development towards World Domination. After almost a month of hard work, our newest creation hit the streets. The official anouncement hasn’t even been made yet, but Cherokee 0.11.1 is out in the wild.

Besides our regular bug fixes and performance enhancements, it is shipped with some new features. SSI support was being requested every now and then, the SSL infrastructure has been reworked and the new reverse proxy is working flawlessly. The Windows build is not a reality yet, but great advances have been made towards that end. Cherokee is currently working under Windows, but the admin is not. And it has to be cross compiled, for now. Anyway, we’re one step closer to releasing a binary Windows build ;)

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here are links to download and read the online documentation with tons of new information and recipes. Enjoy! ;)

UPDATE: Link to the official anouncement.

I posted a note about this at Cherokee’s main site, but I totally forgot to tell you over here. My bad.

However, it’s never late to share good news. A couple of days ago Cherokee’s family incorporated a Polish Cherokee Community as new member!

And they took a huge leap forward by creating Cherokee Polska, which isn’t just another site about Cherokee. So far they’ve translated everything, documentation included. And the effort has been worth it. They received thousands of unique visitors on their first day, and that is only the beginning.

From here, I wish to extend my most sincere congratulations to these guys. Great work!

Since Cherokee has been steadily getting better and better, I expect more localization initiatives will keep popping up. We’ll see it in time. That’s a given.

We’ve been really busy lately. After my adventures in Venezuela at the Infociencias and the Open Source World Conference 2008 in Málaga -I know, I know… I still have to talk about that and post some photos, but the days are not long enough!-, we’ve finally made the time to polish some last details.

Today, Cherokee 0.10 has been born! Even if you’re not into this FOSS World thingie, you should know that this is the fastest web server out there!

Hi there. I haven’t yet had the time to blog about last week’s event at Venezuela where I spoke about Cherokee. Hopefully I’ll be posting some photos really soon. After I came back to Spain on Sunday, I wen’t straight to Malaga to the Open Source World Conference 2008. I’m meeting lots of really interesting people and seeing some friends I haven’t been in contact with lately.

Any way, this was just a quick note. I’ll be making some time to write about these last days once I get home by the end of the week.

Stay tuned until then!

Today is one of those nice days you stumble upon every now and then. Being a geek, you simply have to be happy when a processing monster like this arrives to your workplace.

Yep. It is! Octality’s first and very own Sun Fire 12000. Yes, I know it was recently retired by Sun, but still 52 processors and 288GB of RAM make a hell of machine to test things on. The photograph was taken this morning at the storage room.

Being dedicated to High Performance does have its benefits, don’t you think? It’s deffinitely getting interesting around here. I bet not many start ups get this kind of hardware after just a few months of existence.

By the way, this fella isn’t precisely small. It is 191×85x166 cm and weights 987kg.

The day has finally arrived. After a lot of hard work, we are finally releasing 0.8. It has improved quite a lot in this time. It is faster, much more stable and has been thoroughly tested and documented, at last!

Unfortunately not everything are good news. After putting in a lot of effort fixing the Windows build, we finally decided to postpone this until 0.8.1 the next major release. It has been too long since the last release, and having so many improvements it doesn’t make much sense to hold the relase back just to offer it simultaneously to all platforms. This was the only thing holding us back beside some bugs that had to be fixed, so now this is our one big remaining task for the next release ;)

This is our best release ever. By far. Improved performance, interface and documentation enhancements and lots of new features: much faster I/O cache, huge FastCGI performance improvement, updates (and binary upgrades) are now handled gracefully with no downtime, the load balancing is better and a lot more. Alvaro just sent the official release note minutes ago.

We have a lot of fresh ideas, and as always feedback and feature requests are more than welcome at the mailing lists. Here is the download link. Enjoy it! ;)

UPDATE: I’ve just updated the documentation available at the site.

UPDATE: A quick update to fix some minor bugs has been released: Cherokee 0.8.1.

Many users have told us that they would love to have some more documentation about Cherokee. One of the tasks before relasing 0.8 (which is almost ready by now) is documenting.

Yesterday I wrote a small tutorial that will be part of the documentation. It is a simple walkthrough to set up a couple of virtual servers, basic authentication (PAM and flat) and some redirections.

It will be available at the official site as soon as we make the release, at http://cherokee-project.com/doc

Here it is for now. No screenshots and not much styling in my blog, sorry. It’s just a  quick cut&paste. There’s a lot of other stuff I should be documenting instead of blogging ;)

Configuration Quickstart

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