Not all is web and HTTP. Sometimes we need to create a network service listening to a port. We can create a TCP server in C, Java or even PHP but there’s a really helpful daemon in Linux that helps us to do it. This daemon is xinetd. In this article we are going to create a network service with PHP and xinretd.

Now we are going to create our brand new service with xinetd and PHP. Let’s start. First we are  going to create a simple network service listening to 60321 port. Our network service will say hello. The PHP script will be very complicated:

// /home/gonzalo/tests/test1.php
echo "HELLO\n";

We want to create a network service on 60321 tcp port so we need to define this port on /etc/services. We put the following line at the end of /etc/services

// /etc/services
...
myService   60321/tcp # my hello service

And finally we create out xinetd configuration script on the folder /etc/xinet.d/ , called myService (/etc/xinetd.d/myService)

# default: on
# description: my test service

service myService
{
        socket_type             = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        wait                    = no
        user                    = gonzalo
        server                  = /usr/local/bin/php-cli
        server_args             = /home/gonzalo/tests/test1.php
        log_on_success          += DURATION
        nice                    = 10
        disable                 = no
}

Now we restart xinetd

sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

And we have our network service ready:

telnet localhost 60321
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
HELLO
Connection closed by foreign host.

Easy. isn’t it? But it may be not really useful. So we are going to change something in our php script to accept input. Here we cannot use POST or GET parameters (that’s not HTTP) so we need to read input from stdin. In PHP (and in other languajes too) that’s pretty straightforward.

$handle = fopen('php://stdin','r');
$input = fgets($handle);
fclose($handle);

echo "hello {$input}";

Now if we run our script from CLI it will ask for input.
So if we test our network service with a telnet.

And we have our network service ready:

telnet localhost 60321
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.

we type: “gonzalo” and:

gonzalo
hello gonzalo
Connection closed by foreign host.

Some year ago I faced to a problem to increase the performance of a web application. This application used Smarty as template engine. Smarty ‘compiles’ the templates (the tpl files) into tpl.php files.

As I saw in the server logs almost all I/O reads were to the tpl.php files. Those files where with other cache files in a cache dir on the file system. Nowadays template engine allows to use some RAM backends like memcache or similar. But I don’t wanted neither touch any line of code nor change the behaviour of the template engine. So I decided to do an easy trick.

Server was a linux box. Linux systems has /dev/shm. shm is a temp file system on shared memory. Normally it’s mounted with a percent of our RAM memory and we can use it if we want to increase the performance or our application. I/O operation over RAM are faster than hard disks.

We only must take care about one thing. When we power down the host all data of our tempfs will be lost. So it’s perfect to save cache files. I only need to delete cache dir and create a symbolic link to /dev/shm

rm -Rf cache/
ln -s /dev/shm cache/

And that’s it. All cache reads will be done now in RAM memory instead of  disk.

As I said before we must take care /dev/shm flushes when we power down the server. So if our cache system uses subfolder, we must take care the application will not assume the folders are already created. If we have a tree in our cache directory and we don’t want to change a line in our application we can create the tree in a script and put the script in the start-up of the server.

Easy, fast and clean. I like it.