Andrius Virbičianskas

Last time I wrote, how amazing Node.js is in terms of performance. This time I’m going to share a guide that may or may not be useful to those who moved away from Apache, Nginx or any other web server for that matter. Read more…

It’s been quite a while since I was first interested in Node.js – a server side javascript for scalable network applications. But had no time or excuse to actually try and built something useful with it. Until recently, that is.

Some time ago adclick.lt, an ad delivery network I support, started struggling with available server resources. We had two choices – either get additional server or try to optimize our code. The second choice worked for a while until there was almost no room for improvements. As it turns out, apache + php (php-fpm didn’t help either) can’t handle complex real-time calculations with more than 400 requests per second. Read more…

After putting it off for nearly a year I finally decided to take the exam. I passed, and while with a bitter taste in my mouth, I’m really happy about it.

Preparations

For two weeks on every workday evening I spent an hour or two revising my php knowledge. At first it seemed like an overkill (I was really confident in my skills), but the possibility of not passing forced me to “stick with the books”. This was further encouraged by knowledge that people with day to day experience didn’t pass on their first try. So I thought, why risk it? The resources on the net were my main study material. I did all the free tests I could find and read both official study guide and personal experiences from other takers. Of course, php manual was never forgotten too. Read more…