Php Open_Basedir configuration Apache 2

It seems I've been laboring under a fundamental misunderstanding of dnsmasq, vhosts, and dns. dnsmasq was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, routing requests for example.dev to 127.0.0.1. While I did have vhosts set up, and set up properly, there was no local DNS server to respond and direct those requests to the proper place.

What finally solved my problem was installing bind9, creating a zone for example.dev, and then adding an A record for the wildcard subdomain.

Here are the details:

• Installed bind9 via Synaptic Package Manager
• Added a zone to named.conf.local
• Copied /etc/bind/db.local to /etc/bind/example.dev
• Edited the new zone file appropriately for my needs.
• Tested
• Danced a victory dance

Here's my named.conf.local

zone "example.dev" {
    type master;
    file "/etc/bind/example.dev";
};

Heres my db.example.dev

;
; BIND data file for local loopback interface
;
$TTL    604800
@       IN      SOA     localhost. root.localhost. (
                       201005173       ; Serial
                        604800         ; Refresh
                         86400         ; Retry
                       2419200         ; Expire
                        604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
;
@       IN      NS      localhost.
@       IN      A       127.0.0.1
example.dev     IN      A       127.0.0.1
*       IN      A       127.0.0.1
@       IN      AAAA    ::1

I will not be providing an example of the victory dance.

With that CPU, the best figure you'll get for TPS/RPS is about 5. You've got old hardware, so high concurrency isn't something you'll ever have. But you can lower page load times by working on template performance instead (spriting, combining css/js etc.)

For your testing, drop Nginx for the time being. As you are purely testing PHP throughput, Nginx (and its configuration) is getting in your way.

Focus on the Apache and PHP configuration itself.

A few starter tips:

1. Increase the SHM size for PHP (be sure to increase the ulimit first)
2. Disable Apache keepalives (Apache is not serving anything other than 1 dynamic request when using Nginx, so keepalives are slowing things down).
3. Lower the compresion level to about 7 with Eaccelerator, its adding CPU overhead (which you don't have)

But if I'm honest, on a P4 with 1.2GB RAM - you're never going to get great results :(