by Klaus Graefensteiner
18. February 2010 05:35
The timeouts are back
The PHP script timeouts came back and they worse than ever. I, of course, sent my hourly emails to GoDaddy’s technical support. This time I sent them a detailed report about what URL would cause what kind of error. The error messages returned by the server would include the script file name and the line number. I browsed to my blog almost every minute for a one hour duration. The requests would always result in an error. The script file name and the line number where never the same. It seemed to me a completely random behavior aka shared hosting resource issue.
Figure 1: Building the GoDaddy Lander
The silver lining
The problem with shared hosting and GoDaddy’s technical support is the darker-than-black box environment that your application is running in. You have no clue what is happening on around you. Also, at this point I am not sure anymore whether my blog and all its extensions are absolutely free of errors. It’s time to take things in my own hands. I researched how to build an effective testing and debug environment for PHP, MySQL, IIS 7.5 and WordPress on Windows 7. The toolset for my “GoDaddy Lander” project consist in:
- Eclipse PDT (IDE and Debugger)
- XDebug (Debugger and Performance Analyzer)
- Watir (Web UI testing and automated measuring of response times and results)
- PHPUnit (PHP unit testing framework)
The silver lining is that there is no better way to learn something by taking it apart or trying to find out why it broke. This is my opportunity to learn about the inner workings of PHP and Wordpress.
The WIMPinator Chronicles
WIMP stands for Windows, IIS, MySQL and PHP. This acronym is derived from the more popular LAMP. These of course are the initial letters of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I am now proposing the follow series of blog posts that describe the setup of a professional debug and development environment for PHP and Wordpress on the WIMP platform.
- Getting a Wordpress blog installed in a jiffy on Windows 7 using the Web Platform Installer
- Adding additional features to PHP
- Installing PEAR and PHPUnit
- Installing Eclipse PDT
- Configuring Eclipse PDT to work with Subversion source control
- Configuring Eclipse to work with Ant build tasks
- Creating a new IIS 7.5 fast CGI web site
- Setting up XDebug with Eclipse and IIS 7.5
- Setting up the Zend Debugger with Eclipse and IIS 7.5
- Configuring Ruby and Watir
- Moving a Wordpress blog from GoDaddy shared hosting to my local debugging system
Ausblick
The research for the proposed blog posts is already done and I just need to put my findings down on “paper”. Stay tuned!
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