Benchmarking Server Setup

Hardware and OS

The benchmarking was performed on an Amazon EC2 "small" instance. This provides the equivalent of a 1.75 GHz server with 1.5 G of RAM.

The operating system is a stock Ubuntu 8.10 image provided by a third party ("ami-5c709435").

ec2-run-instances ami-5c709435 -k USERNAME

Software Installation

After the instance comes online, use apt-get to install the following software:

# initial updates
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

# apache2 and php
apt-get install \
    apache2 \
    apache2-threaded-dev \
    libapache2-mod-php5 \
    php5-dev \
    php-pear \
    php5-curl \
    php5-gd \
    php5-gmp \
    php5-mcrypt \
    php5-memcache \
    php5-mhash \
    php5-mysql \
    php5-pgsql \
    php5-sqlite \
    php5-syck \
    php5-tidy \
    php5-xmlrpc \
    php5-xsl

# subversion
apt-get install \
    subversion \
    subversion-tools \
    libapache2-svn

# siege benchmarking tool
apt-get install siege

# development tools
apt-get install gcc make screen

# APC
pecl install apc
echo "extension=apc.so" > /etc/php5/conf.d/apc.ini

# turn off mod_deflate
a2dismod deflate

# check out the project code
cd /var/www
svn checkout http://web-framework-benchmarks.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ html

# We need to modify the Apache !DocumentRoot for the project checkout.
# move the DocumentRoot to /var/www/html,
# because it's hard to change Symfony once it's set
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
cp default default-orig
sed s~/var/www~/var/www/html~ default-orig > default


# Reset permissions and restart the server.
# make everything public to remove all chance of permissions errors,
# then restart apache
chmod -R 777 /var/www/*
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

# done!