The idea is that they are preying on ignorance about something that is actually pretty simple in order to overcharge people and feel like they are smart. I'm sure there are cases where this is not true and they are doing legitimately hard things. But a lot of time I think I'm right. Like, wtf? Why is it so hard to make a php app run well on linux server? It's ridiculous that I can't just buy a ready to go cloud instance for this.

"But everyone's needs are different, blah blah blah"

What ****ing bull****. No they aren't. 90% of small - medium sites need the exact same setup.

EDIT: tyler, that rant was not directed at you, btw

Guys idk if you are like me but it's 2am still on my PC, get this:

http://stereopsis.com/flux/

It's really really really cool if you use PC at night time

it's not

just install xampp. easy enough

just in case you didn't know, nginx is not "en-ginnicks" or something. it's "engine-x." again just in case you need to verbalize it to someone but don't know what it is. i may or may not have done this in the past

xampp on a site with decent traffic? i thought xampp was just the thing you setup locally. and yeah, i actually, suprisingly, knew the engine-x thing

i mean it works well enough, it's just a basic version of apache with zend optimizer installed for php. you can install apc for bytecode caching if you like which is easy.

not sure why you need nginx or node.js or anything like that unless you are serving 58239582039856902860923 concurrent clients

Every other time I download a piece of software that isn't well known Norton Internet Security either deletes it or puts in in quarantine, this is annoying the hell out of me. It happens so frequently and with files I know to be safe, that it can't possibly be any real reason for NIS to suspicious unless it considers any .exe file suspicious.

Anyway this is so annoying i consider it to be a bug (that they seem to not want to fix) that I'm gonna find something to replace Norton. </rant>

Any suggestions on good internet security software?

Microsoft Security Essentials

+1

There's a good Zoo thread about it here too:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...atigue-961628/

Juk

you see this is exactly what i'm talking about. because some c*nt server admin we paid a bunch of money to told us this was the best to set it up. and just like the little grandma at best buy, i listen to the ******* in the black tie.

lol r u srs that is ridic

can't you just get a managed dedicated server ready to go out of the box

do you own your own hardware? because that would be asdasfdshfdsjgksdgdsgasdfhasfg

EDIT: how many users / page loads per day are we talkin' here

I don't even understand what you guys are talking about

see that's the whole point, you don't even need to know what we're talking about to know you don't need nginx to serve up your pages

using a rackspace cloud server (similar to AWS but cheaper). we're talking about like 10-30K hits/day.

kyle i should mention as a slight caveat that it's a very poorly written php app (not written by me) which is sort of a hog, so that may make a diff here

10-30k/day should be trivial for a typical lamp stack + apc/zend optimizer unless the payload is huge (even then something easy like memcached or using apc's storage functions can mitigate that)

the poorly written php app is not something you should solve with how you serve the application obviously, over a short period of time it's gotta be better to refactor this application unless it is both enormous and an in-house project that has no third party alternative

i'm going to rewrite pretty much all of it. but for the time being we have to make due. just so i learn here, could you tell me how you would have deployed it? that is, company you'd choose, steps you'd take, amount of time you'd expect to spend? i know that answer could get detailed, but any info would probably be helpful to me.

i use site5 for most of my stuff because i've been with them since 2006, but i think linode is the preferred VPS provider these days on both price and reliability (can't speak to their CS but i hear it's good from the WHT forums). site5 managed VPS servers are a little expensive though the CS is top-notch from my experience

given the experience you have with server admin i'd go for a managed VPS with a control panel that does simple point-and-click installs of scripts or services. and the CS to install/walk you through most stuff that is supported on their servers, like APC, memcached, or whatever else

i assume it's poorly written because it makes way too many database calls; php is pretty hard to screw up too badly in most other cases to be honest. (unless you are doing large simulations or something; i recently rewrote some monte carlo simulation code i had that was doing probably 8x more CPU-specific work than it needed to be doing, lolz) i highly doubt you're going to be bound by cpu if it's a basic application / site to view with that many visitors but i guess i could be wrong; someone could have done something seriously wrong. and in that case you should be caching expensive and commonly called resources. probably using memcached but possibly with a different persistent data storage engine like mongodb or whatever (i use mysql in a standard RDBMS setup as well as a novel NoSQL solution detailed here).

anyway that is probably too much detail for a general solution. if the php app is choking the server due to disk i/o (most likely scenario) then rewrite the database classes and introduce resource caching if need be

mongodb.... fun :-) you should try writing a scalable, fast and filterable poker hand database intended for billions of hands and thousands of simultaneous searches :-D

John Skeet on SO is amazing, answered so many of my questions

+1 on this. They have really caught up with the competition and it makes life so much easier for setting up/supporting family members and stuff. Just install it and forget about it.

Awesome :-) Is he an SO pro? He seems to answer like 50% of C# / linq / asp.net questions any time of day.

kyle, thanks. actually, there seems to be consuming way more RAM than it should, not necessarily doing too many db calls. Anyway, I'm all setup now (and am using springloops, btw, which is awesome). But I'll checkout site5 for my next project.

Yeah he's a legend, Google employee iirc

I don't understand how he can have a real job. Not only does he provide so many detailed answers, he does it very fast too.

Ah OK. Which version of PHP are you using? I bet it's a garbage collector issue or misallocation of variables/arrays problem. If you are using the newest version of PHP it can fix a lot of "bad coding" errors by mistake in this regard; the GC does pretty good work in 5.3+.