On the eZ blog there's a new post, the first part of a series, showing how to optimize the performance of your LAMP stack with the help of some tuning on the server and software levels.

Nowadays, a website is not only a simple HTML page. Your visitors expect dynamic, personalized information fast and you need a scalable way to deliver content as quickly as possible. This, of course, puts significant pressure on page loads and response time. In this series of posts, we’ll explore eZ’s system architecture and provide recommendations on how you can optimize caching and decrease response time with eZ software.

They then talk about the various pieces of software that make up a typical environment and some tips on optimizing them:

• Varnish
• Apache
• MySQL and MariaDB

Each includes the configuration changes and setup that's helped eZ get the most out of their stack and links to other tools to help you evaluate the performance differences.

The PHP.cc has a new post today sharing a video from their own Arne Blankerts that wonders if it's time to say goodbye to the LAMP stack.

The LAMP stack has been the tried and true backbone of the web for almost two decades. Lately though, more and more websites replace Apache HTTPD with nginx and move from just (My)SQL to No(t only)SQL. [...] In my "Goodbye LAMP Stack?" presentation at this year's International PHP Conference – Spring Edition, I gave a hands-on introduction to HHVM, the powerful new runtime for the PHP language, and showed how to get PHP applications to run on it.

The video is embedded in the page but it's a little difficult to read some of the slides so you can always head over to YouTube for a larger version. If you're just interested in the slides, you can find them here.

Dan Barrett has written up an excellent guide to setting up a LAMP stack on Debian from the ground up. It includes all the commands, configuration changes and screenshots of the interface you'll need.

Setting up a test environment can be a tricky thing when you compile PHP from scratch. As others have mentioned in the past, installations from Aptitude (and the like) lag behind which can quickly put your test environment out of date. Pulling inspiration from Juan Treminio and Brandon Savage, who both wrote excellent articles on setting up PHP from scratch. I like to keep my options open when developing which left both of those articles lacking a few features and extensions that I’d like to have bundled with PHP.

He guides you through a (detailed) process to get the following set up and running:

• Debian itself (GUI installer)
• Network configuration
• Installation of Apache
• both PostgreSQL and MySQL
• Other software including ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick
• PHP 5.5 (with several extensions of its own)

Smartbridge.com has posted the first part of a series of articles looking at rapid development with WordPress and the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).

As more and more people around the world have access to computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, these users are getting connected to the internet, ready to jump into the virtual world of unlimited and unrestrained information. Websites today are the most popular tool to deliver this vast information to an ever increasing audience. Let's talk about choices when it comes to rapidly developing custom non-enterprise websites.

He starts by eliminating some of the language alternatives off the bat because of either their lack of quality CMSes or complexity. He then moves on to Open Source options, focusing in on PHP for its low learning curve and popularity. There's a brief comparison of Drupal and WordPress, but it's pretty high level. He's saving the good parts of WordPress for the next part of the series.

On PHPClasses.org there's a tutorial posted from Michael Fuhrman about getting a LAMP environment set up with Samba. This setup will allow a single server to serve up sites stored on remote machines and accessed over a Samba share.

Web sites can be served using PHP scripts stored in a different machine than the actual Web server machine. Read this article to learn how to setup a Fedora based Web server machine (without a desktop GUI) using Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and using Samba to serve sites using files shared by separate machines.

He steps you through the installation of everything you'll need - a VM to set up the server on in VirtualBox, configure the network interface and the packages/configuration updates you'll need to make. It's a pretty lengthy tutorial as it includes every single step you need (and sometimes its output). One note on this method - because it would be accessing the files over the network for each Apache request (possibly multiple) it will cause much more latency than if they were on the local machine.

On the "Learn Computer" site there's a recent post that wonders if the web development standard of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack is "still strong" and will still stand up with new technologies.

This year in tech (like almost every other year) has been filled with buzzwords. Many of them this year, however, are based around big data processing and web content: NoSQL, Hadoop, BigTable – the list goes on. With all the fuss around these new technologies, one might be tempted into thinking that these are the technologies of the future, and that from now on our servers and websites will be built upon, leaving technologies like LAMP in the dust.

They talk about some of the things the LAMP stack doesn't do well like difficulties with scalability on both the web server and database side. There's also mention of the things that it does do well, like getting things up and running quickly and with a solid structure.

That being the case, the LAMP stack is still going very strong, and it’s definitely still extremely viable in small and medium-sized deployments; there are no signs of it waning in that regard, and I’d expect it to be a standard deployment for many companies and organizations for quite some time to come.

Tecmint.com has a new tutorial that walks you through the installation of a full LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) on a CentOS or RedHat installation.

This howto guide explains you’ll how to install Apache Server with latest MySQL 5.5.27 and PHP 5.4.7 versions with php required following modules on RHEL 6.3/6.2/6.1/6.0/5.8/5.6, CentOS 6.3/6.2/6.1/6.0/5.8/5.6 and Fedora 12,13,14,15,16,17 systems using Remi repository via Yum tool.

Thankfully, package management has made things a lot simpler than they used to be. Most of the time you're only a few commands away from a working installation (if all you need are the generic setups). They explain what each piece of the installation is and how to set up the custom "Remi" yum repository to get the latest versions of the software - Including PHP 5.4. They show how to stop and start each of the servers (MySQL, Apache) and a few screenshots of what the output of your phpinfo page should look like.

In this recent post to Reddit.com, a "solid novice with PHP" asks the community for some insight into what the day-to-day life is like for an average LAMP developer.

I wanted to hear from someone who does LAMP development for a living, What does your work day look like? That is to say that, I have no idea what the responsibilities for a LAMP developer look like. Are these people putting together entire websites on various platforms (wordpress, joomla, whatever)? Are you simply doing backend work (setting up databases, working with tables, etc)? All of the above?

The comments on the post talk about things like:

• The differences between the "startup" and "business" life of a typical developer
• Sympathy over some of the debugging methods in PHP
• Technical issues
• Working as a lone developer
• The variety of skills needed
• Discussion of specs and system architecture

What's your average day like? Share it here!

In this recent post to the Nodeable Blog, they suggest that the days of the typical LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) are numbered because of what many of the cloud services have to offer.

For the past 10 years, the LAMP stack has laid waste to proprietary software stacks. Yes, Microsoft has held onto gargantuan profits, but LAMP has become the foundation for leading web services, whether Google or Facebook or [Insert Big Web Brand Here]. LAMP is the future. Or was. That is, until cloud killed it, as Eucalyptus CEO (and former MySQL CEO) Marten Mickos posits in a great keynote from the Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2012.

In the keynote he pointed out that it's becoming less about the whole setup and more about combining technologies to get the results you need - less "stack" and more "linked technology" (and not always the same tech for every node). He pointed to the Amazon AWS service as a prime example of a platform that allows endless flexibility as to what software can be installed and how it can be used, all with a few clicks of a mouse.

In this tutorial on the XPertDeveloper site today they show you the "quick and not-so-dirty" way to get PHP + Apache + MySQL set up on a Ubuntu machine (from packages).

I have started working with Ubuntu 11.10 and my first task was to install PHP, Apache and MySQL in that. This is because without these three things computer is useless for PHP Developer. So Here I am sharing this article which shows how to install PHP, MySQL and Apache and configure with each other. This would be very useful for newbies, who have just jumped into web developing.

The process mostly consists of installing a few packages - mysql-server, mysql-client, apache2, php5 libapache2-mod-php5 (as well as several others for various PHP extension support) - and starting up the default Apache server.