Webtide

Tag: php

  • HTTP/2 Push Demo

    I have recently presented “HTTP/2 and Java: Current Status” at a few conferences (slides below).

    The HTTP/2 protocol has two big benefits over HTTP/1.1: Multiplexing and HTTP/2 Push.
    The first feature, Multiplexing, gives an edge to modern web sites that perform ~100 requests per page to one or more domains.
    With HTTP/1.1 these web sites had to open 6-8 connections to a domain, and then send only 6-8 requests at a time.
    With a network roundtrip of 150ms, it takes ~15 roundtrips to perform ~100 requests, or 15 * 150ms = 2250ms, in the best conditions and without taking into account the download time.
    With HTTP/2 Multiplexing, those ~100 requests can be sent all at once to the server, reducing the roundtrip time from 2250ms to ideally just 150ms.
    The second feature, HTTP/2 Push, allows the server to preemptively push to clients not only the primary resource that has been requested (typically an HTML page), but also secondary resources associated with it (typically CSS files, JavaScript files, image files, etc.).
    HTTP/2 Push complements Multiplexing by saving the roundtrips needed to fetch all resources required to render a page.
    The net result of these two features is a vastly improved web site performance which, following well known studies, can be directly related to more page views, and eventually to more revenue for your business.
    The Jetty Project first implemented these features in SPDY in 2012, and improved them in HTTP/2.
    We are now promoting this work to become part of the Servlet 4.0 specification.
    If you are interested in speeding up your web site (even if it is in PHP – Jetty can host any PHP site, including WordPress), contact us.
    The presentation I gave at conferences includes a demo that shows an example of HTTP/2 versus HTTP/1.1, available at GitHub.

  • Jetty 9.1.4 Open Sources FastCGI Proxy

    I wrote in the past about the support that was added to Jetty 9.1 to proxy HTTP requests to a FastCGI server.
    A typical configuration to serve PHP applications such as WordPress or Drupal is to put Apache or Nginx in the front and have them proxy the HTTP requests to, typically, php-fpm (a FastCGI server included in the PHP distribution), which in turn runs the PHP scripts that generate HTML.
    Jetty’s support for FastCGI proxying has been kept private until now.
    With the release of Jetty 9.1.4 it is now part of the main Jetty distribution, released under the same license (Apache License or Eclipse Public License) as Jetty.
    Since we like to eat our own dog food, Jetty is currently serving the pages of this blog (which is WordPress) using Jetty 9.1.4 and the newly released FastCGI module.
    And it is doing so via SPDY, rather than HTTP, allowing you to serve Java EE Web Applications and PHP Web Applications from the same Jetty instance and leveraging the benefits that the SPDY protocol brings to the Web.
    For further information and details on how to use this new module, please check the Jetty FastCGI documentation.
    Enjoy !

  • WordPress & Jetty: perfect fit

    I posted a while back about the capability of Jetty 9.1’s HttpClient to speak HTTP over different transports: by default HTTP, but we also provide a SPDY implementation, where the HTTP requests and responses are carried using the SPDY transport rather than the HTTP transport.
    Another transport that is able to carry HTTP requests and responses is FastCGI.
    The neat feature about FastCGI is that it is the default way to deploy PHP applications: fire up a proxy server (usually Apache or Nginx) in the front and proxy requests/responses to the FastCGI server (usually the PHP FastCGI Process Manager, or php-fpm).
    In this way you can deploy the most used PHP frameworks like WordPress, Drupal and others.
    And you are not limited to PHP: FastCGI allows you to easily deploy other dynamic web languages and frameworks such as Django (Python-based), Rails (Ruby-based) and others.
    We are happy to announce that Jetty 9.1 can now proxy to FastCGI, enabling deployment of PHP frameworks.
    Why this is good, and how different it is from having – say – Apache or Nginx in the front instead of Jetty ?
    The first and foremost reason is that Jetty is the only server that supports SPDY Push.
    SPDY Push is the biggest performance improvement you can make to your website, without a single change to the application being served, be it a Java web application or WordPress.
    Watch our video that shows how the SPDY Push feature that Jetty provides makes a big performance difference.
    The second reason is that SPDY version 2 is being deprecated really fast in favor of SPDY version 3 or greater.
    Browsers will not speak SPDY/2 anymore, basically reverting your website to HTTPS behaviour, losing all the SPDY benefits if your server does not support SPDY 3 or greater.
    As of the time of this writing, only servers like Apache or Jetty implement SPDY version 3 or later of the SPDY protocol, while Nginx only implements SPDY version 2.
    At the Jetty Project we like to eat our own dogfood, so the blog site you are reading is WordPress served via Jetty.
    If you’re using Firefox or Chrome, just open the browser network console, and you will see something like this:
    jetty-wordpress
    As you can see from the response headers, the response is served by Jetty (Server: Jetty(9.1.0.v20131115)) from PHP (X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.3-1ubuntu2).
    Of course, since both Jetty 9.1’s server and HttpClient are fully asynchronous, you have a very scalable solution for your PHP-enabled website: currently the JVM that runs this very website only uses 25 MiB of heap.
    And of course you get all the SPDY performance improvements over HTTP, along with Jetty’s unique SPDY Push features.
    This is good for cloud vendors too, since they can run Jetty and expose PHP applications with a minimal amount of resources, high scalability, and unique features like SPDY Push.
    FastCGI for Jetty is sponsored by Intalio. If you are interested in knowing more about how Jetty can speed up your website or how to setup your PHP web application in Jetty, contact us or send an email to Jesse McConnell.