SourceLabs released its AMP Stack and associated test data this morning. Please forgive the (debatable) spam in advance; this post does contain pointers to useful test information for capacity planners who are building out AMP infrastructure for demanding deployments and others who are working with PHP. Consisting of pre-configured versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP, the SourceLabs AMP Stack provides documented test results to give customers a higher level of confidence in the reliability, scalability and security of AMP than has been available to date. The stack is available free of charge from our website at www.sourcelabs.com/AMPstack.htm. This initial release of the stack has been tested per three of the Seven CERT7 dependability criteria: unit testing, security hardening and scalability. CERT7 augments the testing approaches that are typical of open source projects by adding tests that focus on the performance, stability and scale characteristics of integrated systems. Not only is this the first time that an integrated open source stack has been tested this way, this is the first time the results of the tests and the tests themselves (provided through GPL) have been made publicly available. While many enterprise software vendors do this kind of testing, they don't open the process for customer review. We think that open testing is a big part of the future of open source, and we're looking forward to the community taking our testing harness and adapting it to their needs. Some highlights of our findings from the test process: . We performed a 72 hour burn-in acceptance test utilizing a subset of the CERT7 scalability tests, resulting in 70-100% CPU utilization on a 2 CPU Hyper-threaded machine, confirming the absence of detectable memory leaks for these scenarios. . Over 7,000 individual security checks were performed, showing that a number of potential security vulnerabilities exist in default configurations of components of the AMP stack. We configured the AMP Stack to protect against these vulnerabilities. CERT7 Scalability tests were performed in three areas: Static HTML, Computational PHP and Database scalability, resulting in scale-out and configuration recommendations for AMP deployments. Key findings include: . Apache Web Server scalability was limited by bandwidth in all cases tested, and not CPU or memory capacity. . PHP processing scaled linearly with respect to CPU capacity. For capacity planning purposes, this means that the desired number of servers running Apache Web Server/PHP for a given application can be calculated based on the processing speed of an individual user scenario. For this, an understanding of the processing speed, the number of concurrent users, and the desired user experience/response time would be used. . MySQL scalability was limited by memory. For capacity planning purposes, MySQL implementations should be optimized for the greatest available memory rather than adding CPU capacity. Complete Test results are at http://www.sourcelabs.com/SourceLabsApacheMySQLPHPTestResults.pdf To promote the new stack we are also announcing a maven contest in our forums. Users that download our AMP stack and provide feedback, make clever puns, ask or answer questions in our forum qualify for the grand prize: A 100 Watt Marshall Guitar Amplifier and a Fender Stratocaster Electric Guitar. Just like the SourceLabs AMP stack, this is the kit that will let you "go to 11". Each Friday afternoon for eleven weeks we will be giving away a weekly prize consisting of an Ipod Shuffle and a DVD copy of "This is Spinal Tap", culminating in the announcement of our grand prize winner on June 10, 2005. Complete rules will be found at www.sourcelabs.com/mavencontest.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
