Zend Server CE 5.0

PHP

Introduction

Zend have released their latest version of Zend Server, version 5.0, which includes a Community Edition.  In this post I’m taking a look at the free Community Edition for Windows, which includes the following (some items are optional):

• Apache 2.2.14 (Can use IIS instead)
• PHP 5.3.1 / PHP 5.2.12 (Selected when downloading the installation)
  • Common and additional PECL extensions.
  • Zend Optimizer+
  • Zend Debugger
  • Zend Data Cache
  • Zend Java Bridge
  • Zend Guard Loader
• Zend Framework
  • Base
  • Extras
  • Dojo
• MySQL Essential Database Server 5.1.43
• PhpMyAdmin
• Database drivers
  • Informix
  • Oracle OCI Driver
  • IBM DB2 RTCL
  • MS SQL Server Native Client

AskDave: CF7+ CPU usage on Windows

ColdFusion

Ed asked:

“Would it be possible you to share the ‘CF7+ Windows only’ code that you have for CPU usage please?”

There are two things Ed might be after:

1. CPU Usage of ColdFusion.
2. CPU Usage as a whole across the host machine.

I’ll tackle both but keep in mind that this is Windows only and I don’t recommend doing this on a live server without significant testing.  The reason for being Windows only is that we’re using the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) which allows us to access all sorts of lovely information.  In my experience however, there can be some memory issues with repetitively querying the WMI service.  I’ve yet to spend enough time tracking this down to know if it’s WMI playing up, ColdFusion not closing objects properly or if it’s just an old bug that’s been patched.

Friday beer

Me

My beer, originally uploaded by Mister Dai.

Lost is on tonight, Wales vs. France in the Rugby and a beer waiting for me. Thank you Friday!

Upload size before CfFile-Upload

ColdFusion

Introduction

Uploading files in ColdFusion is dead simple but there are a few quirks that some developers overlook.  One is that does the uploading… it doesn’t!  Any file that’s submitted from a form has already been uploaded to the server before any of your ColdFusion code is executed.  Those submissions are stored as temporary files with temporary names in the ColdFusion temporary directory (wow, that’s a lot of temporaries).  If you look at the contents of your upload form field you’ll see this information:

form.upload = C:\ColdFusion8\runtime\servers\coldfusion\SERVER-INF\temp\wwwroot-tmp\neotmp39336.tmp

Now we know where the upload is being kept.  Why would we want to bother with this?  One reason would be to check the upload size.

“Yeah but I can do that with the information cffile returns! What’s the point Dave!”.  Alright, chill out, I’m getting there.  If the file size is too big, do you really want to bother the server with the task of moving it from one place to another and would you then have to make sure you delete it.  If it’s too big and you leave it in that temporary directory, it’ll be removed anyway when your code has finished.  Seems a lot easier doesn’t it?

Memcached 1.4.4 Windows

Internet

Memcached is a simple caching service that let’s you store data in memory and retrieve it easily.  A lot of web applications already support using it to improve performance by caching information there instead of constantly asking the database for the same data again and again.  To give you an impression of how useful this is, it’s used by the following sites to help cope with all their visitors: LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Flickr, Bebo, Twitter, Typepad, Yellowbot, Youtube, Digg, WordPress (so this blog!), Craigslist, Mixi and many more!

Unfortunately there hasn’t been a Windows port that’s been kept up to date for a while.  Until now…

Windows Port

Thanks to a team called “NorthScale” there is now an up to date port of Memcached for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.  This even includes proper service support so memcached can be installed to start as a Windows service.

• NorthScale
• Downloads
• Windows Service installation

Virtual Appliance

They even produce a memcached Virtual Appliance.  This is a VMWare compatible system image that’ll let you run a cut-down memcached server.  It appears to be configured to maximise memory usage and provides a web interface to help configure any settings.

• Virtual Appliance

SpyMemcached

For those of us using ColdFusion and Java, a member of the NorthScale team also produces SpyMemcached, a Java client for memcached.  CFML users can take advantage of this using the memcached project hosted on RIAForge.

• SpyMemcached