Recently I’ve been moving the Nullvariable web servers into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This means our customers will be getting some great benefits in increaced speed, better backups and future scalability.

AWS is a fantastic platform but it’s not for just anyone. Recently I wrote a couple of tutorials on setting up Drupal sites within the AWS cloud. I’m currently using the fantastic Pantheon project as a basis for some of the projects that we’re running in the cloud now.

If you’re a coder or a Drupal user you might find these tutorials helpful in taking full advantage of the AWS platform.

• How to setup EBS with Pantheon’s Mercury
• How to setup EBS with RAID0 for Pantheon’s Mercury project

Using these tools and techniques along with the Pantheon project we’re able to launch fully redundant servers that can easily scale into the thousands while handling traffic at lighting speed. (In a recent benchmark that I ran, a single Drupal server that we configured was able to serve 10,000 sequential requests in just 5.43 seconds!)

Want more? Check out the Pantheon and Amazon Web Services groups over on drupal.org. Nullvariable.com goes live using AWS next week!

What’s your take on cloud technologies? Are you using AWS or another cloud service?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Cloud Computing with Amazon and Drupal

Want a quick hack to boost speed of your pages? There are two ways to accomplish this.

• Login to your server as root or normal with sudo privileges.
  • open your php.ini with vi (command may vary depending on where your php.ini file is located)

  vi /etc/php.ini

  • Find and uncomment (default is disabled), or add the following line:

  zlib.output_compression = On

• This method enhances every site/page using php on the server by sending compressed files to clients that support it.
• The second method will affect only a single site and requires only access to your .htacess file.
  • open your .htacces file
  • add the following line

  php_flag zlib.output_compression On

Update: I plan to do some testing on performance to see if this really does help. Just simple visual and file download tests show that it does to me but more data is needed, coming soon!
image credit

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Enhancing PHP speeds (Drupal and Wordpress too)