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Hiawatha version: 7.5
Operating System: Fedora 14

Hi Hugo,

We're in the process of shifting as much as possible onto Hiawatha (I think it's excellent, personally) and one site I have to move is based on the lightweight Snews CMS. I have been messing but thus far have had no luck in getting rewrite rules to work. I'm not sure how helpful it'll be, but the .htaccess rules are:

RewriteEngine On
#RewriteBase /sNews17
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) $1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?category=$1 [L]

I struggle to decipher them. Is there any way you could help?

Yes, there is a way: I could tell you the answer

UrlToolkit {
  ToolkitID = snewscms
  RequestURI exists Return
  Match ^/(.*)$ Rewrite /index.php?category=$1
}

You saved my (professional) life Hugo. I was facing a change back to Apache, which I detest. Thank you!

Quick questions for you - do you think there is any significant advantage in switching to an ext3 filesystem on a Hiawatha server? To max out performance I mean... Also, is there any performance advantage in using a php-fpm daemon for fast-cgi processing of php?

As you can maybe tell, I am trying to get the max performance out of all the machines we have! Thanks again.

Ext3 is in fact an ext2 filesystem with a journaling patch. SInce ext2 is quite old, it's not very fast. You better move to ext4 (which has completly been rewritten) or ReiserFS. But, I'm not a filesystem expert, so perhaps I'm not the right person to ask this question.

php-fpm instead of what? Instead of normal CGI? Yes, definitly. FastCGI PHP is about 15 times faster than normal PHP. php-fpm instead of Hiawatha's php-fcgi? To be honest, I don't know. I don't have any experience with php-fpm.

Having done a bit of reading, it seems that as far as servers are concerned, ext3 is better as soon as MySQL enters the fray. Ext4 kills MySQL performance for whatever reason. Test after test on Phoronix shows that. Apache benefits slightly too, so logically Hiawatha would. Sticking with what we have for the moment though (ext4). Further reading puts php-fpm slightly ahead of other ways of serving php, in terms of raw throughput. Memory usage wasn't included in that benchmark. All interesting in my quest to squeeze the most from Hiawatha!

You were right: ReiserFS is extremely good.

Thanks again.