Create your personal Web hosting 1

As some of my personal/professional web hosting are to renewed, I was thinking of moving them to my Olimex A20.

Reasons why I think the A20 can be a solution:

• low power consumption , so I can leave it on
• my site have a small audience so performance is not a bottleneck ( I’m not sure a mutual hosting have better performance)
• I can control exactly services started, can be very formative and challenging
• Spend my money to buy something that I can use later instead of renting something
• For the price of one year of web hosting I can buy a new A20
• It’s challenging and I might learn a lot of things/li>

The other side of the coin

• Very difficult to configure (you have to configure a lot of thing DNS,Apache,open your internet connection)
• You are now responsible for the security of your system (you’re opening your system to Internet)

Starting from fresh installation

To decide first I must have an idea of the performance of an installed apache and I will remove all unused things (X-windows for instance)
Removing unecessay modukes and services
I started from a fresh installation and configure the network as I explained on a previous article.
I removed unnecessary X-windows lib, the box will start faster and I can keep data on the sd card.

Removing unnecessary modules

apt-get remove --auto-remove --purge libx11-.*
apt-get autoremove --purge

Before:

 /dev/root 3808912 2634612 980816 73% /

After that:

free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 874 63 811 0 2 34
-/+ buffers/cache: 26 848
Swap: 0 0 0

I know I can win more memory by switching to mono-user and allow only one terminal. But I will do it in a later version.

You can also remove unnecessary modules:

lsmod

Module Size Used by
cpufreq_powersave 1207 0
cpufreq_userspace 3318 0
cpufreq_conservative 6042 0
cpufreq_stats 3699 0
g_ether 55821 0
pwm_sunxi 9255 0
gt2005 13408 0
nand 114172 0
sun4i_keyboard 2150 0
ledtrig_heartbeat 1370 0
leds_sunxi 3733 0
led_class 3539 1 leds_sunxi
sunxi_emac 34009 0
sunxi_gmac 29505 0
8192cu 454131 0

free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 874 63 811 0 2 34
-/+ buffers/cache: 26 848
Swap: 0 0 0

I can remove modules that handle video memory:
After that:
rmmod sun4i_csi0 videobuf_dma_contig videobuf_core ump lcd sunxi_cedar_mod gt2005
free -m

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 874 62 812 0 2 34
-/+ buffers/cache: 25 849
Swap: 0 0 0

<h3>Raw Performance</h3>
By default apache is installed, to test do
<div class=”wp_syntax”>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class=”line_numbers”>
<pre>1

wget -O- http://192.168.1.171/

He will fetch index.html in /var/www

First step I try to know how much request this apache can handle. From my laptop I use a very useful command named ab that call concurent request and report time and how many request handled. From my console I type

1

with 4000 means how many request to use, 100 means number of client, test_data_1.tx is the gnuplot output and you can put the url you want to test.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Server Software:        Apache/2.2.22
Document Length:        999 bytes
Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   3.426 seconds
Complete requests:      4000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      5104000 bytes
HTML transferred:       3996000 bytes
<strong>Requests per second:    1167.60 [#/sec] (mean)</strong>
Time per request:       85.646 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.856 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1454.94 [Kbytes/sec] received

To test in a more real example I did on the box

1
2

cd /var/www
wget -r -O  http://olinuxino.4pro-web.com/

From my laptop

1

ab -n 400 -c 100 -g test_data_1.txt http://192.168.1.71/olinuxino.4pro-web.com/index.html

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

Document Path:          /olinuxino.4pro-web.com/index.html
Document Length:        48352 bytes
 
Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   1.756 seconds
Complete requests:      400
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      19452800 bytes
HTML transferred:       19340800 bytes
<strong>Requests per second:    227.79 [#/sec] (mean)</strong>
Time per request:       438.995 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       4.390 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          10818.39 [Kbytes/sec] received
 
It looks like that the A20, can support the number of request I expect.
In the next article I will test with a running wordpress site, and I will explain how to configure and optimize Apache and put your website on Internet.