The other day, we were helping a long time client with setting up a new development server configured with Ubuntu Server LTS 16.04, which comes with PHP 7.x. Benchmarks of PHP 7.x show that it is faster than any PHP 5.x version by a measurable margin, hence the client's attempt to move to the newer version of Ubuntu and PHP.

But when we tried benchmarking the new server against the existing server, which has Ubuntu Server LTS 14.04, showed that the new server is extremely slow compared to the existing one.

In a previous article from over 5 years ago, we advocated the use of Apache MPM Worker Threaded Server with fcgid over Apache's mod_php.

That was for serveral reasons, including faster handling of static files by Apache threaded server, and lower memory utilization since PHP is not embedded in every Apache process.

However, there were some drawbacks, mainly that APC opcache cache is not shared, and each process has to have its own copy.

On Friday May 2nd, 2014, Khalid of 2bits.com, Inc. presented on Drupal Performance.

The presentation covered important topics such as:

We previously wrote in detail about how botnets hammering a web site can cause outages.

Here is another case that emerged in the past month or so.

Again, it is a distributed attempt from many IP addresses all over the world, most probably from PCs infected with malware.

Their main goal seems to be to add content to a Drupal web site, and trying to register a new user when that attempt is denied because of site permissions.

The pattern is like the following excerpt from the web server's access log.