Nginx: Protecting a folder using htaccess

First we need to install the htpasswd application, it is located in the apache2-utils package. This package has no dependencies on apache, so it is safe to install it – it will not download the full apache for you 🙂 To install it on ubuntu type: sudo apt-get install apache2-utils Once installed we can use […]

Read more Nginx: Protecting a folder using htaccess

Running a website on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) using Nginx and PHP-FastCGI

Recently I decided to switch hosting provider from a shared server to a VPS. My choice of linux is Ubuntu so i installed the latest version, Ubuntu 10.10 server. Instead of using Apache as webserver, which has been my choice of webserver for years, I decided to go for Nginx. Nginx is known for its […]

Read more Running a website on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) using Nginx and PHP-FastCGI

Playing with WSGI in Python (part 1)

Lately I have been playing around with WSGI in Python. WSGI is an interface between the web server and the web application, it is meant to simplify writing your own web framework in Python. My intention is not to write an fully fledged web framework, but rather just play around with some ideas I have […]

Read more Playing with WSGI in Python (part 1)

An update on the mono memory issue

The workaround I tested a few weeks ago did not really solve my problem – actually it made it worse. The autorestart caused mono to hang and not restart at all, so my site stopped responding every 6th hour. I quickly had to disable this. Still I had the memory consumption problems. From various sources […]

Read more An update on the mono memory issue

mod-mono-server2 memory consumption problems

Lately I have been experiencing that the mod-mono-server2 process running on the server hosting the video upload web-service (I blogged about this in my last post) has been consuming a lot of memory. Once, it even reached the point where all memory (1.5GB) of the server was consumed and the Linux OOM-killer killed the mod-mono-server2 […]

Read more mod-mono-server2 memory consumption problems

Building a distributed web service using Amazon Web Services

A few months ago my employer asked me if it would be possible to create a web service for encoding videos. I had been playing around with Amazon’s web services for a while, and it seemed like the perfect foundation for building this. I decided to build the backend in Python and use ffmpeg for […]

Read more Building a distributed web service using Amazon Web Services

Parsing AJAX web pages using PyKHTML

I needed to parse data from a series of web pages, usually i would have used CURL to download the page and then used regular expressions to extract the data i was interested in. But the page i was going to parse was using AJAX to reload part of the page (when you clicked the […]

Read more Parsing AJAX web pages using PyKHTML