(Crosspost on www.robertlacroix.com)

Since running approximately 4 months on the new page I wanted to take the opportunity to get you up to date what basically „runs“ www.sk-gaming.com from a technical perspective and what we did to improve the new page. I will go into very detail which might only be interesting for readers with a technical background.

Virtualized
Our web page runs solely on a bunch of Xen servers. Xen is an open-source virtualization platform (Hypervisor) that allows us to flexibly set up new virtual servers which can share the same physical hardware with other virtual machines. With Xen we can separate services that should better be on separate machines, utilize our physical hardware even better and move servers from one physical machine to another in case of a hardware failure.

Stable
A long time ago we’ve chosen Debian as our Linux distribution because it has proven to be extraordinary stable and it provides a very logical and lean approach to administrate it. Currently we are running the AMD64 release of Debian etch, their current stable version, on both the Parent Domain (dom0) of Xen and the virtual machines (domU’s) to leverage high amount of ram.

Scalable
To scale to the increased demand we’re experiencing since running on the new page we set up the load balancer keepalived to build a redundant firewall (active/passive) which amongst other things distributes the web requests to a farm of web servers. When developing the new page we took care that the code can be spread among multiple web servers safely.

Light
More than a year ago we switched our web server software from Apache to lighttpd which I can say was one of the best decisions ever. Lighttpd, as the name says, has a very low resource footprint, almost no memory usage and a really flexible way of configuring it, without sacrificing any features we need to run www.sk-gaming.com. And best of all, it’s literally fast as light.

Known
That we use PHP as our scripting language is pretty much known and has not changed. Currently we are running on PHP5 and use XCache for caching PHP intermediate code. Interesting maybe for other XCache users is that when we upgrade to the current xcache-1.2.2 we noticed a drop of around 30ms rendertime, even though XCache was already the fastest opcode cacher out there (at least according to this benchmark).

Fast
On the old page we used full page caching on some often loaded pages like the index page, but it was implemented in a very shirt-sleeved way: Every minute a script downloaded the site and pushed the content into the database. The site the user received simply got that rendered site from the database and sent that to the client. The problem with that implementation is obvious: it does not scale beyond a few number of pages cached, needed special coding on these to work and still put certain load on the database.

The approach we needed was a more general one which would work on every page and takes into account, that we have many pages which are user specific (e.g. /member/JFK looks different for you than for me). The solution we now have is leveraging the speed and the scalability that memcached offers, an in-memory cache for data objects, combined with some code (which I might share in a future article) that does basically the following:
1. Check if memcached has a cached version of the requested page
a. If yes: deliver it from there and stop processing
b. If no: go on
2. Render the page normally but put the output to a buffer
3. Put that buffer into memcached and deliver the rendered content
With that and using memcached to cache some other functionalities that normally needs database queries, we reduced the number of these queries to zero on cached pages and replaced them with only four, always fast (because non-blocking and distributed), memcached queries. What do zero database queries mean for the users? Page rendering of cached pages only takes around 10ms, which is for most users faster than the page actually needs to travel through the internet to your computers.

Compliant
Most pages are already XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant which you can easily check with the W3C validator. We still have to work on some issues left, but we are committed to make www.sk-gaming.com completely compliant to current web standards.

Secure
To protect your password from being stolen on logging in, we decided to submit your passwords securely through an SSL encrypted connection. For extra security, we added the “Lock” icon next to the form, where you can enter your username and password, which leads you to a secure login form. This login form allows you to enter your password in a secure environment and makes sure your password is submitted a) only to us and b) only secured with HTTPS. When entering the username and password on the (non-encrypted) front page that cannot be assured, because the content could have been altered after leaving our web servers (man in the middle attack). For that extra security to work it is important that these requirements are fulfilled:
1. You receive no certificate errors when opening https://www.sk-gaming.com/login/
2. You have no rootkit or backdoor on your computer which captures key inputs or has installed trusted root certificates

Future-proof
With this solid basis we are looking into implementing and optimizing our infrastructure even more. For example we are evaluating how our users can benefit from new technologies like CardSpace/OpenID or Semantic Web. I will keep you updated.