On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:09:44 -0500
Ruslan Sivak <russ at vshift.com> wrote:
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> I am looking to set up a CentOS server for hosting a high traffic PHP
> site (specifically Drupal 6).
>
> I am trying to figure out what's the best way of setting up PHP. The
> standard mod_php seems to not be a good solution, as it requires
> apache to be in the prefork configuration, due to PHP not being
> thread safe.
>
> Something like mod_fcgi seems to be the way to go, but I can't seem to
> find a good guide on setting it up.
>
> I installed Zend Server, but seems like they are only supporting
> FastCGI for Apache on Windows, and only mod_php on Linux.
>
> Their admin control panel is using lighttpd and mod_fcgi on Linux. I
> getting it to work with Apache, but am having issues with the missing
> mysqli libraries.
>
> Is it recommended to use mod_fcgi on CentOS? Is there a way to get it
> to work with Zend Server?
>
> If not, should I try to get things working with lighttpd? I'm not
> sure how easy it would be to set up a config to work with Drupal.
I have a Drupal website, and I originally set up my site
running on localhost on my laptop using lighttpd, it worked fine for a
localhost. At the time my 'live' site was hosted by an outfit that was
using IIS, I'm now with a host that uses RHEL 5 and Apache. And I
currently use Apache as my localhost server also; since I decided to
set up a few virtual hosts for testing and they were much easier to
figure out how to make it work on Apache than lighttpd. (Maybe because
there were more examples online. )
This is the tutorial I used for my first setup with lighttpd, and though
it's a bit dated it's still workable. It came up as the third result
when I just searched install lighttpd and php:
http://www.howtoforge.com/lighttpd_php5_mysql_fedora7
I've never actually configured php, I just install the files (including
php-mbstring), and create a user for mysql and extract the Drupal files
to the docroot and I'm good to go. If it's a high-traffic site others
may have more specifics about php to add... for me the defaults have
worked fine. HTH.