Zend Server CE Personal Experience
Agile Web Application Development with Yii 1.1 and PHP5
I would like to tell you all about my ‘incredible’ experience with one of the new Zend Tools called ‘Zend Server’.
Have you ever experience a series of ‘impossible things’ that happened one after the other without any comprehension? Well, that happens to me with Zend Server CE.
I am currently running a MacOSX Snow Leopard on a 17 inch MacBook Pro for the development of my projects and I have the built in Apache, PHP 5.3.1, and MySQL 5.1 as a backend DB. I do work with Dreamweaber CS4 to develop the GUI interfaces together with PhotoShop and Fireworks (all from Adobe Creative Studio CS4) and use Eclipse modified for PHP and Javascript developments. To debug my client-side code I do have Firebug and that’s it.
If I tell you the truth everything was working fine, but I wanted to tweak a bit more the performance of my code (we all do that), so I checked the Zend Tool Zend Server CE. Its documentation was quite good and for the comments of the rest of the programmers I thought was worth a try. This is what happened:
- download and install Zend CE Server
- restarted my computer
- started Zend Server
- damn, nothing works here, nothing! my computer suddenly slows down, what is happening?
- looked at the processes, my God! mr Zend Server had five PHP opened at the same time as a service! And also a service controller that doesnt allow me to stop any of the Services!
- how should i stop this? info: http://files.zend.com/help/Zend-Server-Community-Edition/mac_osx_installation.htm
- this info is even worst, where is installed? where all those scripts that the documentation is talking about? on the Applications folder (where is installed) there is nothing as what they are saying
- found it (have to view hidden files in my Mac, done -defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE) with a full Mac Search (thanks spotlight)
- uninstalling application
- restarted computer
- going to code a bit, going to Applications folder… diablo! my Finder crashes!
- found tones of info, none of them worked -.DStore, .launch Services, .Onyx, etc, reinstall Snow on top, not a fresh install… reboot, Finder still crashes
- building backups (Time Machine is quite old -a week?), whilst in the process… see next
- looked onto Apache XAMPP install (I do not use it anymore), what??!! htpdocs and all mysql databases GONE!
- i rund around my house screaming, yelling, and asking God why this is happening to me thousand times! -dont laugh, you probably did it a couple of times too
- Worked with Data Recovery, FileSavage, and some data recovery programs that didn’t help at all… where are all those files?
- last solution: fresh install Snow Leopard, Carbon Copy Cloner and TimeMachine working together for a scheduled daily backups.
Well, thank you very much Zend Server, you obviously helped me to improve the performance of my code as I had to rebuild all those libraries that weren’t backed up before making my code faster, cleaner and easy to implement and use… woaw, unreal.
Also, thanks Zend Server CE as I reinstall my OS, having only those apps that really are part of my development process and making me buy a 1.5 TB external drive to have all my backups saved daily. If it wasnt for you I wouldn’t bother spending my money on such things. You rock Zend Server!
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Thank you very much Shahar for your quick comment,
As you probably read on my article, I was quite upset with the result of my experience but I also want to say that wasnt gun threat to use it, was my fault and maybe product related ignorance alltogether.
But I thought it truly was as easy as explained on your site, I truly believed it could helped me but it didn’t, maybe for something that was installed or configured in my computer, maybe… We will never know now as I had to do a fresh install, but every test should be taken into consideration before releasing a product isnt that right? It meaned that something was not right (in my computer or wherever that made Zend Server crash or going confuse) and believe me when I say mr Shahar that my computer worked really fine before I installed the product.
Nevertheless, thank you very much again for the kindness of your language as it only proves that you are true gent. I really like other things from your network and I will keep using them…
Thanks again for your comment
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I think you just don’t know that much about OSX if you had that many problems. I have been using on a macmini, hackinosh, and an Imac working just fine. I also have it running on multiple HP server in a running production environment. IT sound like an operator error here. Don’t blame thing you don’t understand. I have been using unix for over 20 years and to have more than one php process is not out of the norm. Just don’t start changing your dev environment without backing up.I have a local and offsite back-ups. Besides it sound like you have tweaked your OSX install before Zend Server did. Learn the command line that can be much more helpful in tracking down problems on macs. Zend work with enterprise sized apps. I have three major apps with over 2000-3000 concurrent users per an app thanks to Zend. You had something on your mac.
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Hey dd,
You are probably right; I should learn far too many things in order to get my hands on top of what ‘I do not understand’. But I disagree with you about ‘tweaking’ my MacOsx (how would I? If I know ‘nothing’ at all about it). The only thing running on that computer (not anymore) was a Xampp install and Adobe Creative, that’s all. Everything froze like hell… and yes, maybe it was something I missed but as I looked deep into the documentation provided on Zend there was ‘nothing’ about being worried on certain things I should consider before install… and about uninstalling? Followed everything and guess what… ‘nothing’.I looked at the information and I was amazed on the possibilities of PHP debugging and failed on the test. I just installed the server, I didnt know I should install it on a ‘fresh’ OS and let it ‘tweak’ my Mac before I should even ‘dare’ to do anything with my own computer.
I am glad that Zend is working for you, seriously, but that was my experience, my computer was working before I installed it and my computer failed afterwards and there was no information about anything related to consider before installing.
I have nothing against Zend guys, I do use ZendStudio and love it, wanted to improve my experience and failed. Maybe this post was written in a moment I was very pissed but some people out there may consider reviewing its configuration and backing up its data before installing the good Zend server.
(ps: since that experience I do have cloud, offline, and local data backup systems… all dev files on dedicated server -linux though, I should start learning the commands)
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Just spent the last week trying to get Zend CE to behave. OMG.. Not a chance in hell. So much for considering their paid comercial flavor.
Fresh install WIN2008 R2 IIS 7.5 Only installed The basic PHP 5.3 and nothing else. I did MySQL seperate.
Experienced anything from Sporatic MySQL internal 500 errors, To Zend Controller not loading java scripts, to running request traces via IIS and seeing “FastCgiModule, Error no process on the other end of the pipe.” To name only a few issues.
Junk on WIN 2008. Don’t bother.
Net Center, Inc.
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#12 written by Komenge Mwandila 1 month ago
Thank you for this blog, i just installed Zend Studio and i was just about to install the server too. Instead i thought i should do some more research and thanks to you i will stick with IIS and Apache for now. However, i will to see how the Zend studio is going to do, just can’t move fast enough with Web Expression and Netbeans is too heavy, unless someone here has an better ideas for IDEs i could look into with php/html/css code completion.
Thanks alot for the blog Antonio Ramirez
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Hi,
I’m the technical PM for Zend Server.
I’m sorry to hear you had such a bad experience with Zend Server CE – but I have to say that we have quite a lot of users who run CE on Snow Leopard Macbooks (including myself) and I’ve never heard a report of Zend Server affecting Finder or any of the other core OS components.
The one problem I see in your report is that the documentation you’ve found (probably though Google?) is to the 4.0.x versions of Zend Server CE, not to the current (5.0.x) versions. This is something we will hopefully fix in the near future, by adding links to the current version of the docs.
As for starting up multiple PHP processes, Zend Server on OS X runs as an Apache module (mod_php). The way Apache is set up is quite standard – running in prefork mode, meaning Apache will start a number of processes and wait for requests. While there is no traffic, these processes should not take much CPU, and their memory consumption is not very high. In any case this is a fairly standard Apache setup (not specific to Zend Server).
If you hadn’t removed Zend Server from your system we would have been happy to investigate the issues and assist. Unfortunately I guess it’s too late for that now.
Happy PHPing,
Shahar.