Performance Blog

We released Cool Stack 1.3.1 recently. This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I’d like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please [...]

It’s finally here. Before you download the release, please do read the documentation. It’s over a month late, but hopefully the features will compensate for the delay.Almost every single component in the stack has been upgraded. Two new packages, CSKpython and CSKnginx have been added. And yes – the python package does include mod_python too.You [...]

I know many of you may be wondering why Cool Stack 1.3 isn’t out yet, so I thought I’d post an update on where we are with the release. When I first started talking about this, I was hoping to get the release out in early May. But several things have colluded to cause a [...]

It’s been close to 4 months since we released Cool Stack 1.2, so it’s time to start thinking about the next release. Here’s what we have planned so far and as always I’m looking for feedback from current and future users on what you’d like to see. Needless to say, that all currently known bugs [...]

We have fixed the issue with the PHP dtrace extension not working in Cool Stack 1.2. As I mentioned in my announcement post, we had already identified the issue but didn’t have time to fix it before the release. The issue was that /usr/ccs/bin/ld was being used to do the linking but this doesn’t work [...]

Finally, it’s here. We missed our October 31 deadline, but hopefully that won’t matter when you see the contents of the release. Short summary of changes in the 1.2 release. You can download the new packages from the Sun Download Center. Some caveats to be aware of : These packages will over-write Cool Stack 1.1 [...]

Sun recently announced the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 and Sun Blade T6320 systems based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor.  You can find lots of information on the various features and functionality provided by these servers. One other cool feature is that these systems ship with Cool Stack pre-loaded. The Cool Stack 1.1 packages [...]

We are currently working on Cool Stack 1.1.1 which will have the following components updated, in addition to fixing known bugs : Apache 2.2.6 : Add mod_proxy, mod_fcgid, SMF support PHP 5.2.4      : Add dtrace extension, add new fastcgi version for use with non-Apache webservers APC 3.0.14 Suhosin 0.9.20 MySQL 5.0.45: Add SMF support Perl [...]

Many folks have reported problems with APC in Cool Stack 1.1 resulting in a SEGV in the CoolTools Forums.The APC version in Cool Stack 1.1 is APC 3.0.11 and if enabled, extensions such as mysql, dtrace etc. fail with a SEGV. Media Wiki doesn’t work either. We have tested APC 3.0.14 and this version seems [...]

Build notes and Tuning tips for Solaris lighttpd seems to be increasingly popular, so much so that netcraft has started tracking it’s use on production websites. I’ve spent some time building, tuning and running simple performance stress tests on lighttpd 1.4.15 on Solaris and thought I’d share what I learnt. Building lighttpd My build of [...]