Speed improvement

Here's some tips which I  applied recently on one busy ded server and the result was a significant reduce in disk I/O load and so faster speed, lesser load avg.

- mount /tmp in ramdisk : Here's the /etc/fstab file line related to tmp :
none /tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777,nosuid,nodev 0 0

Check if php uses /tmp as session.save_path , mysql also uses /tmp as tmpdir (mysqladmin variables | grep tmpdir). I've notices on websites with high join queries, mysql has a lot of I/O in /tmp so it's recommended to mount this to ram instead of hdd.


- Mysql datadir : /var/lib/mysql  , recommended to mount in a SSD disk which will give you much greater performance.

- nginx + php-fpm  : There're lots of resources on web suggesting that nginx+php-fpm have much more performance rather than php via apache2 handler.

- ... I'll update this post if I found/remember new tricks ...

- More ?

Security improvement : nginx symlink and php-fpm chroot features

I've found the new directive in nginx old documentation :

disable_symlinks if_not_owner; # off | on | if_not_owner

Default value is off ! Setting it to if_not_owner is a good security improve and I recommend it.

Also don't miss php-fpm chroot feature ! You can make a chroot jail for working fpm pool by extracting an OS-template to chrooted folder ! (Select the template which matches your main OS). I had to run the following additional commands to make the dns resolving and php working correctly in chrooted jail :

cd jail-path

mknod -m 666 dev/null c 1 3
mknod -m 666 dev/zero c 1 5

mknod -m 666 dev/random c 1 8
mknod -m 666 dev/urandom c 19

cp /lib/*dns* lib

cp /lib64/*dns* lib64

echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > etc/resolv.conf

chown -R user:user .

Install wine with MS Visual C++ and Visual Basic runtimes

I just wanted to use some win downloaders on linux ( Orbit downloader, HiDownload, Net Transport, ... ) but they didn't run correctly on wine.
Install latest version of wine using epel repo on RHEL . Then you'll need to install MS Visual C++ and Visual Basic runtimes to make them working :


wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks
(apt-get install cabextract OR yum install cabextract)
sh winetricks corefonts vcrun6 vb6run

And that's it !