Starting this new company makes me feel like an artist with a brand new canvas. As I mentioned in my last post cPanel linux hosting will be our main focus when it comes to shared and reseller hosting. cPanel’s versatility makes a new LAMP deployment possible. I’m calling it the The atomicSTACK™.
The atomicSTACK™ introcuces new techonology that replace and enhance the typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. The result is less loaded servers, increased performance and faster websites. Check it out.
CloudLinux
There’s a new kid on the linux block called CloudLinux and he’s kicking ass and taking names. It’s an operating system based on the popular CentOS kernel that incorporates a new proprietary technology called LVE – Lightweight Virtual Environment. On a standard linux OS we can’t control many parameters that cause a single website to bring down a server, namely CPU, memory and disk I/O. CloudLinux’s LVE technology allows us to do exactly that. We can now isolate each domain completely so no longer can one domain hog all a server’s resources.
Main Features:
- Tenant Isolation – All domains on the server are isolated from each other so if one goes down everyone else is still safe and stable.
- Resource Limits – CloudLinux utilizes a kernel level technology to set resource limits per domain. This ensures a domain can never use more than the resources given to them.
- Application Resource Limits – Set individual limits for a blog, application, and website so that a sudden spike to one will not take down the rest of the server.
- Abuse Reporting – Identify accounts that are over-using resources so we can address their needs.
This all adds up to better performance and an increase in overall server stability. CloudLinux also imposes its will on MySQL resource usage so pretty much all bases are covered. Plus there is a cPanel plugin so clients can see their CPU usage in real time.
The CloudLinux feature to set a limit for domain I/O usage is due to be launched at any time and this is simply huge. Disk I/O is basically how hard a drive has to work to seek and write data. A drive can only spin so fast so if there is a large amount of activity certain requests get queued making things appear slow. Some sites can hog huge amounts of I/O so being able to limit this is going to usher in a new era of stability on a shared server.
LiteSpeed
Now it’s time to beef up that old Apache. LiteSpeed is a high-performance, high-scalability web server. It is completely interchangeable with Apache and can quickly replace a major bottleneck in existing web delivery platforms. LiteSpeed Web Server has superior performance in terms of both raw speed and scalability. Benchmarks demonstrate that it is more than 6 times faster than Apache! When serving static content, LiteSpeed surpasses well-respected content accelerators. When it comes to dynamic content, LiteSpeed is more than 50% faster in PHP content delivery than Apache with mod_php.
eAccelerator
Now that we’ve taken care of the Linux OS and the web server is time to inject some ‘roids into PHP. eAccelerator is a PHP accelerator derived from the MMCache extension for PHP. It increases performance of PHP scripts by caching them in compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated.
Every time a PHP script is accessed, PHP usually parses and compiles scripts to bytecode. Once installed, eAccelerator optimizes the compiled bytecode and caches this to shared memory or disk. Upon subsequent accesses to a script, eAccelerator will access cached bytecode if it is available instead of the script being compiled. This avoids the performance overhead of repeated parsing and compilation. It uses more memory but improves overall performance.
Percona MySQL
Not satisfied with super-charging just the OS, Apache and PHP I researched what could be done to improve MySQL and I found Percona. Percona is an enhanced drop-in replacement for MySQL, with better performance, improved diagnostics, and added features. Percona Server’s focus is threefold:
- Quality of service: speed and consistency of query execution.
- Transparency: improved instrumentation and measurability.
- Operational flexibility: making the server easier to maintain.
Outstanding. 
Memcached
Memcached is an open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. It is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Memcached is not in use by default, it is something that can be used if your code supports. Memcached can be used in both PHP and MySQL (as well as other programming languages).
This will be the standard LAMP stack on cPanel shared/reseller hosting VMs. CloudLinux and LiteSpeed are not open source but they will be available for client VMs for an extra charge.
