# using smybolic links for web page hosting and speed



## wonslung (May 24, 2009)

i know using symbolic links for files that are the same will save space...

but lets say you have 3-4 vhosts on the same machine and they all share a lot of files that are the same, say....3 wordpress blogs or something....would using symbolic links for those files do anything other than save space?

would it speed things up?

would it slow things down?


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## trev (May 24, 2009)

I doubt there'd be any speed impact. There may be some securty implications if the links are outside the normal web root though.


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## vivek (May 24, 2009)

No speed gain whatsoever. It may save some disk space. To gain webserver speed try

Tune networking stack, especially buffers

Tune webserver

Load accf_http kernel module.

Disable unnecessary webserver modules

Use FastCGI for php / python etc

Use php cachers such as xcache

Use RAID disk setup

Tune the database

Use lightweight webserver such as nginx or lighttpd 


HTH


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## wonslung (May 24, 2009)

yah, i've done MOST everything on that list.

after much experiementing i've found the fastest config for me so far is nginx serving static pages and apache doing php

before that i had nginx with php-fpm and it worked fine but on some of the bigger php scripts id would time out a lot.  using nginx as a reverse proxy serving static files i get much faster page loads, i was just currious about the symbolic link thing because of the amount of space i could save

i didn't think i'd gain speed but i wasn't sure if i'd LOSE it either.

core 2 quad 2.66ghz 8gb ram 3 500 gb hard drives using ZFS filesystem on freebsd 7.2

nginx php xcache and apache2.2 all from ports

Thanks for humoring my silly question =)

(i did save about 300 mb...i guess every bit helps)


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## vivek (May 24, 2009)

One of our customer runs nginx (as loadblancer) based system with over 10+ php backends. Never had problem with php timeouts peaking at 60 Mbps (almost serves 2-3 million page views per day).The nginx server is AMD1216 with 4GB RAM and 250GB SATA disk. Wordpress.com also powered by nginx and they have over 300 server. I thing something is wrong with your php.ini configuration.


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## wonslung (May 25, 2009)

perhaps, i'm obviously not an expert.

i'll read up on php.ini 
thanks


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