Xitami and PHP

johnie

Hi guys.
I'm working on a web-kiosk project which has a lot of content in a lot of languages. Therefore i'm thinking of installing a web server on each kiosk-terminal so that i can built and maintain the application in PHP easily and dynamically, instead of developing 1000s of pages. The kiosks will be offline so i'm not concerned about security. Sometime in the future the kiosks will go online and that's another reason for a local webserver.

Now my problem. The kiosks run on win2k with only 64Mb RAM. So i want a small, fast and reliable server. I tried Xitami and looks good. I want to install PHP as a CGI. I currently don't have a system with 64 RAM to test it so i have to ask before i develop anything. My questions:

Is Xitami a good idea? Do you suggest any alternatives?

PHP as a cgi is a good solution? Is it stable?

Will 64Mb of RAM do the job or the system will crawl? The pages will be relatively light.

I tested a small php website i built for Apache and some pages worked with Xitami and some didn't. All the pages were of the same format (with some includes() ).
Are there any strong differences using PHP with Apache than with Xitami?

And something else regarding php development. Can i have different versions of PHP on the same PC for development purposes?
Where the php.ini should be located? If it's not in the windows dir, does it look anywhere else e.g in the php installation dir? I just want to put the application on the kiosks without having to copy files here and there.

I hope i asked all the questions i had. If i didn't i'll be back 🙂

Thanks a lot

John

victordb

Don't use it, it does not handle workload well at all. Use Apache or IIS, I reccomend Apache because it is better suited for workload and PHP functions if you install it do not install it as CGI on Apache also unstable. If you want an easy installation use OpenSA it is an installer that automatically configures PHP and Apache together on Windows systems. As for 64megs that should easily be enough to run a fast website. I currently have 32 megs on mine and it get thousands of hits and I've had minimal error with it.

z_darius

Originally posted by victordb
Don't use it, it does not handle workload well at all.

Just stumbled upon this post. It seems ou never tried Xitami so I'm offering a little answer, based on reviews by ohers and my own 4 year experience with the server. Well, actually there is little to say about experience. I installed it, configured with PHP and in 4 years I had one Xitami crash due to a faulty PHP code I wrote. The thing just runs, serving 5000 to 10000 requests per day 24/7 since Nov 1999 on a P2@300MHz with 256 RAM. OK, I took Xitami down once for an upgrade. Took me about 2 minutes and the site was back online.

Now, some quotes by others who performed formal tests:

CPU usage, from UNIX Review February 2003

As an administrator of 40+ servers running Apache, I was interested in comparing Xitami's performance to Apache under heavy load. I set up a "Web site hammer," which is nothing more than a series of Unix boxes running forked instances of lynx. With a 100-Mbps NIC installed on each client, I pointed the "hammers" at the Web server and generated about 1,000 hits per second. Next, I ran the "top" utility to measure the CPU usage. At an estimated 1,000 hits per second, over a period of five minutes, the CPU usage under Xitami was only 53%, while Apache saturated at 90%.

Benchmarks

Ready for the benchmarks? Are you sitting down? If not, please do. All three servers were set up on the same machine from Pogo, an Athlon 750 with 256 MB of RAM. I started, tested, and shut down each server one at a time. I used the httperf benchmarking software, and the command for the single test looked like this, which makes httperf generate a total of 10 sessions at a rate of one session per second (each session consisting of five calls spaced two seconds apart).

For a harsher test, I used this command, which makes httperf generate a total of 1,000 sessions at a rate of one session per second (each session consisting of 100 calls spaced one second apart).

For example, look at the Request Rate data. From Windows Apache, we see 46.6 requests per second at 21.4 milliseconds per request. From Linux Apache, we see a marked improvement of 91.1 requests per second at 11.0 milliseconds per request. IIS responds only a tenth of a request per second behind Linux Apache, with 91.0 requests per second at 11.0 milliseconds per request.

Jump over to Xitami and the improvement is exponential. Under Windows, Xitami handled 180.7 requests per second at 5.5 milliseconds per request.

Finally, Linux Xitami took up 181.1 requests per second at 5.5 milliseconds per request. The jump from the slowest (Apache running under Windows) to the fastest (Xitami running under Linux) is a 74.3 percent improvement.

full article ( a year older than your post is at
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/0,39023166,20262449,00.htm

piersk

Having used it myself, I can say that it's pretty good. I don't know if I'd use it on a production when I can use something like apache, but as a development server it's good.

I found it a bit confusing to configure as well...