All posts by stoimen

php.ini for two web servers

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Two Apaches one php.ini

Yes in our case this was the fact. There were two web servers, Apache 2 in our case, and one PHP. The php.ini file was in /etc/ as usual. Everything seemed to be perfect. But however some directives in php.ini does not worked for one of the server.

Why the second server does not read php.ini?

Well actually when you load the php.ini for the first server it loads correctly with everthing declared in it. However when you start the second server, of course on a different port than the first one, you get all the php.ini values as if they are default.

Why?

That’s some feature of PHP we didn’t know. I still don’t have an explanation about it. But of cource there’s a …

Workaround

You can put everything for the second server in the .htaccess file, so this will act as second php.ini for the second web server

Flex 3 HSlider thumb gap issue

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Introduction to the problem

When the HSlider is set up with two or more thumbs there’s a gap between them always. The problem is that you may want to put them on one single value of the slider, but it’s not possible.

First: hide your thumbs

The quick solution is to make custom skin for the thumbs, setup the height and width of the thumb to be 1px and make a transparent background image for skinning them. That of course does not solve the problem. There’s still gap of 1 value between the thumbs, and still you cannot select one single value with both of them. Continue reading Flex 3 HSlider thumb gap issue →

When you should use base64 for images

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Base64 and image files

For those who don’t know base64 it’s an encoding format for any data. In that case with the images we can simply say, that base64 equals to text (string) representation of the image itself. In most cases you’ve image tags with src attribute pointing to the http source of the image.

Overview of the problem

Let’s say we’ve a HTML document with 100 images into. That’s a rare case I agree, but sometimes it happens. You’ve to preload the thumbnails of an image gallery where only one image is displayed in a bigger size. As I mentioned before the progressive JPEG suits better for a large image but for the thumbnails you’ve to use baseline JPEGs.

Note: In fact the technique with base64 representation of the images is not well known. I think that’s because there are not so much examples with pages with more than 100 images.

But anyway. We’ve the HTML document with 100 images (100 <img> tags). That means directly 101 requests/responses from the server. In my tests on my localhost, which is supposed to be fast enough, that case loaded 2 MB with a simple small JPEG for the image, loaded 100 times, and approximately 3 seconds. Which yet again on the localhost is extreamly slow. The image is on my machine, the server is here… what else?

How to put the images inline?

The other way to do that is to put all you images in you HTML document. Than the first and more important rule for optimization (see more here), to make fewer requests is done. You now have only one request. And with the response you’ve all 100 images. That’s good when you’ve different images, cause every repeatable element in your CSS should be made with HTTP request once and than repeated with the CSS. In other way you risk the size of the document transfered in the web.

The results

The second case with the inline images and the only one request is giving me an average response time of 900ms. The size of the document is bigger, yes. I had 5KB for the HTML with no base64 images, and then the size increased to 45KB. That’s 9 times more. But however 45KB is nothing for the web, instead of all those 2 MB in the previous test.

How to make your images to strings?

Speaking in PHP terminology there is a function called base64_encode, which with a combination of file_get_contents(imagefile), make the files a base64 string.

Is there any issue?

Yes there is. First you cannot have your image files in a remote server, cause file_get_contents must read only from the local filesystem. Than if you process all those files before returning them to the client, where’s the point? You lose all that time you’ve spent with the technique.

The reasonable solution

I think this technique is good for cases like the one described at the beggining. You’ve a page with more than 100 images. Then you’ve the base64 representation already. Let say you have it in your database as string and don’t need to convert it everytime you return the image. That may happen on upload of the image and the image enters the database with its base64 representation, and it’s done.

Zend Framework – Disable Zend Layout

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What’s Zend Layout

Everybody knows that sometimes you need header and footer for almost every page. In Zend Framework you don’t need to include them in every template page, as it will be if you were using Smarty for instance. You just need to use Zend_Layout. It’s easy and it’s helpful.

What if you don’t need layout for a controller action?

Well if you have to have a given controller action with no use of Zend_Layout, you just need to disable it.

How …

… simply by placing this line in you controller action:

$this->_helper->layout->disableLayout();