This blog turned 1 year old last month and I think all of my readers were glad to read it. I’ve never asked for help and I offered help to people who needed it. But today I’m forced to ask my readers for help because it is the first time in my long practice when I really don’t know how to solve my problem.

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Sometimes you may need to implement controlled downloads when all downloads requests being sent to your script and then this script decides what to do: to send some file to the user or to show some access denied page or, maybe, do something else. In lighttpd server it can be done by returning X-Sendfile header from script. Nginx have its own implementation of such idea using X-Accel-Redirect header. In this short post I will try to describe how to use this feature from PHP and Rails applications.

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I was looking forward for this feature for last 3 months! And at last, it is there! Now, nginx works on our streaming servers perfectly and flv streaming will not be Lighttpd’s unique feature anymore. :-) This post is about how to use new Nginx module http_flv_module introduced in 0.4.7 (but there was a bug in its implementation, that can be fixed with my patch) and made completely perfect in 0.4.8.

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It will be really short post about using set of free tools to implement fully functional flash video streaming server. So, what we are going to get at the end of our setup? We are going to get some type of completely free streaming support that is available with Macromedia’s non-free Flash Communication Server (Flash Media Server) (FCS). :-)

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Aftrer my previous post about high-performance RoR deployment methods, I’ve got lots of messages/emails/IM conversations about some errors in previous benchmarks and there were lots of suggestions about extending of tested software set and modifying testing methodology. So, that is why I decided to perform deep and wide performance testing for all deployment schemes I can find. In this article you can find description of testing methodology and, of course, benchmarks results. If you want to know details of specific software setup, take a look at articles in category “Ruby On Rails” to find all articles from “Looking for optimal Solution” series (I’ll post all of them in next few days).

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Because of not fully correct testing methodology, benchmark results are not fully correct. So, I decided to redo all tests. New benchmark results you can get in “Looking For Optimal Solution” series Summary post.

This week we have started one new project with Ruby on Rails as primary framework. My first task was to prepare runtime environment for it on one of our development servers. When I have tried to research how people doing it, I noted that there is no information about how to deploy rails application with nginx as frontend and what is performance of such solution. Before blindly make any decisions about future platform I’ve decided to make some performance tests of the some most popular rails web servers/frontends. Results of these tests you can find here with configuration samples for all software that I have used.

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