Web Server

Installing Apache Solr on Drupal 6

One of the sessions that most interested me at the Do It With Drupal thing in December 08 was Drupal Search Options led by Robert Douglas. He spoke mostly about Apache Solr and how it can be an alternative to Drupal's core search. In addition to being faster and more accurate than core search, it can perform a faceted search (like eBay, Amazon, or any number of retailer have).

A big caveat for Apach Solr in Drupal, however, is the Java requirement. Ya gotsta have Java on your server to this thing to work. In my old hosted server, I was SOL. But since I've moved to Slicehost, I can install pretty much whatever I want. So first-up on the weird-things-I-want-on-my-websites list was the Apache Solr search on my Drupal sites.

And yes I installed it and yes it works (try the search at greg-willis.com. But I didn't find any tip-to-tail installation information, so I thought I'd add my experience to help anyone looking to do what I did. The whole shebang is below the fold...

Tags: Drupal 6 | Search | Slicehost | Web Server
Written by Greg on 04 Feb 09

Drupal Tuning

One of the reasons I opted for moving all my sites to a VPS was to be better able to control parts of the web server that hosted servers can't let you touch -- the Apache server, the MySQL server, things like that.

If I were just creating HTML pages, I wouldn't have make the change. But having a database-driven website, while opening up wide possibilities, also introduces performance issues. When I finally got Gallery2 running on my current setup, the whole thing slowly ground to a halt. But after tweaking the PHP, Apache and MySql config files, it hummed along better than before.

And I can't emphasize enough that you can gain wonderful quickness just by using Drupal's performance settings (admin/settings/performance). Especially with D6, it can be quick as a bunny.

One of the most useful sessions at the Do It With Drupal conference in Dec 08 was Matt Westgate & John VanDyk session on Performance and Scalability. In brief, here's an outline of what they discussed:

Tags: Drupal Performance | Web Server
Written by Greg on 24 Jan 09

VPS

Ever since I started doing my own personal website back in aught-four, I've been on a shared hosting service. You pay a few bucks a month and you get some server space. And for my old Wordpress site, and until recently my Drupal sites have done fairly well on the shared hosting.

But I'm a bit of a control freak (which might explain why I have to have my own website). And my latest hosting company, Site 5, recently tweaked their servers and broke some functionality on one of my websites. Now there's nothing wrong in anything they did -- indeed not worrying about server upgrades is one of the benefits with shared hosting. But it offended my inner control freak, so something had to be done.

And that something is getting a Virtual Private Server (VPS). I went with Slicehost and for $38 a month I get a Linux box with an IP address, 20GB storage, 200GB bandwidth, and 512 MB of RAM. And that's it. Everything else -- Apache, PHP, MySQL -- I had to install by my lonesome. But not too lonesome, they have a robust set of tutorials to guide a VPS newbie such as me through the process.

It hasn't been all easy, but I've learned a lot and I now have a much greater control over my web servers. For instance, I've improved my web page performance to be over ten times faster. And going forward, I'll be able to play with the Solr search functionality with Drupal.

In short, it's worth the pain.

Tags: Web Server
Written by Greg on 02 Jan 09
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