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From UnixBench project homepage:

UnixBench is the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite, updated and revised by many people over the years.

The purpose of UnixBench is to provide a basic indicator of the performance of a Unix-like system; hence, multiple tests are used to test various aspects of the system’s performance. These test results are then compared to the scores from a baseline system to produce an index value, which is generally easier to handle than the raw scores. The entire set of index values is then combined to make an overall index for the system.

Some very simple graphics tests are included to measure the 2D and 3D graphics performance of the system.

Multi-CPU systems are handled. If your system has multiple CPUs, the default behaviour is to run the selected tests twice — once with one copy of each test program running at a time, and once with N copies, where N is the number of CPUs. This is designed to allow you to assess:

* the performance of your system when running a single task
* the performance of your system when running multiple tasks
* the gain from your system’s implementation of parallel processing

Do be aware that this is a system benchmark, not a CPU, RAM or disk benchmark. The results will depend not only on your hardware, but on your operating system, libraries, and even compiler.

First install required libraries for compilation :

apt-get install libx11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libxext-dev perl  perl-modules make

Then get the unixbench and run it :

wget http://byte-unixbench.googlecode.com/files/unixbench-5.1.2.tar.gz
tar xvf unixbench-5.1.2.tar.gz
cd unixbench-5.1.2
./Run

On VPS, especially with challenging small memory limit (e.g. 64MB or 128MB) lighttpd is the best option instead of Apache. In this article I will show you how to do that. On a fresh box (which has no apache installed) type this to get lighttpd webserver installed

apt-get install lighttpd

Now install PHP5 CGI package and PHP5 command line package

apt-get install php5-cgi php5-cli

Edit the following file

nano /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

and uncomment this line

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

Now enable fastcgi module

lighty-enable-mod fastcgi

Restart Lighttpd

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

You get the welcome page

Lets install MySQL 5.1 server and client

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

and optionally phpMyAdmin

apt-get install phpmyadmin

Now create a test page to see if phpinfo is all Ok

nano /var/www/info.php

Type in the following

<?php
phpinfo();

If you have installed LAMP (Apache, MySQL and PHP on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) then running this on SSH

php -v

would be giving you certain PHP Depreciated warning like these

root@sea:~# php -v
PHP Deprecated:  Comments starting with '#' are deprecated in /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/idn.ini on line 1 in Unknown on line 0
PHP Deprecated:  Comments starting with '#' are deprecated in /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/imagick.ini on line 1 in Unknown on line 0
PHP Deprecated:  Comments starting with '#' are deprecated in /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/imap.ini on line 1 in Unknown on line 0
PHP Deprecated:  Comments starting with '#' are deprecated in /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/mcrypt.ini on line 1 in Unknown on line 0
PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Apr  9 2010 08:23:39)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies

Its a noted bug with Ubuntu and changes may be pushed soon but to fix this just edit each of these files and replace comments starting with ‘#‘ to ‘;‘.

On SolusVM, your host may provide you with OS templates such as “Ubuntu 10.04 LTS LAMP” and you click-install it to your VPS. Now how do you change its mysql’s root password? simple, run these two commands on SSH after doing

mysql

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('MyNewPass') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

ADOdb library is a very good data abstraction layer for PHP. Installing a PHP extension enables the library to auto-detect this and give even better performance. To install this library on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS do this

apt-get install php5-adodb

I recently found out about T1LIB. But I had no clue how to install this. Lucky for me I am on Ubuntu and I have the ability to search for a package.

T1LIB is actually in the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. You can install it by punching in the following command

apt-get install t1lib-bin

If you are like me, you may be doing this to install essential build libraries to compile something from source

# wrong method
yum install build-essential

Build essential is a Ubuntu / Debian package. On CentOS, you need to do this

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Warning: This will install all development tools approx 49 packages closing to 65MB

I asked my client to buy a Linode for some testing purposes and I tried it for the first time. I must say, Linode is blazzing fast. Downloads are touching 8M/sec and speed, performance is as if its running on a VM on my local system.

Update: Now its been almost a month running Linode and I strongly recommend this VPS company.
Update 2: If you plan to signup for LINODE, use my referral link, it will give you the same price but it will help me a lil http://www.linode.com/?r=587d6a71720a4606811a5710431462642c56bc21

On Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Do this (there’s no need to do any compiling anymore)

apt-get install libssh2-1-dev libssh2-php

You can now test if PHP recognizes it’s new ssh2 extension by running:

php -m |grep ssh2

Don’t forget to restart Apache

service apache2 restart

Its been about almost more then two years since I have been playing with CentOS on many different platforms etc. Its very stable but on the other hand, PHP/MySQL updates are very hard to get and still PHP is 5.1.6. I tried EPEL repo and it updated PHP to 5.3.1 but still there were conflicts with stuff and many core packages.

So, I thought why not move to Ubuntu since it has just announced 10.04LTS (Long Term Support) in April 2010. Folks at iWeb were really nice to do a reinstall without any charges and also process a memory upgrade request at an amazing 50% discount.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

• Apache 2 version is 2.2.14
• PHP version is 5.3.2
• MySQL version is 5.1.41-3ubuntu12
• SVN (Subversion) version is 1.6.6

As a comparison CentOS 5.4 has the following versions

• Apache 2 version is 2.2.3
• PHP version is 5.1.6
• MySQL version is 5.0.77
• SVN (Subversion) version is 1.4.2

So if you are a PHP developer looking to deploy a Linux flavour on your new box, choose Ubuntu