OpenLink Community Blog

As promised in an earlier post titled: Virtuoso, PHP 3.5 Runtime Hosting, phpBB3, and Linked Data, here are direct links to the "silent movies" mentioned in the past:

• Installing Virtuoso on Vista with PHP Hosting
• Installing Virtuoso on Mac OS X (Leopard) with PHP Hosting
• EC2 Installation Part 1 (*AMIs take about 5 minutes to get assembled*)
• EC2 Installation Part 2 (*post AMI creation part*)

Virtuoso is an extremely compact product that is very easy to install. The ease of installation carries over to the PHP runtime when bound to Virtuoso.

Runtime hosting is functionality realm of Virtuoso that is sometimes easily overlooked. In this post I want to provide a simple no-hassles HOWTO guide for installing Virtuoso on Windows (32 or 64 Bit), Mac OS X (Universal or Native 64 Bit), and Linux (32 or 64 Bit). The installation guide also covers the instantiation of phpBB3 as verification of the Virtuoso hosted PHP 3.5 runtime.

What are the benefits of PHP Runtime Hosting?

Like Apache, Virtuoso is a bona-fide Web Application Server for PHP based applications. Unlike Apache, Virtuoso is also the following:

• a Hybrid Native DBMS Engine (Relational, RDF-Graph, and Document models) that is accessible via industry standard interfaces (solely)
• a Virtual DBMS or Master Data Manager (MDM) that virtualizes heterogeneous data sources (ODBC, JDBC, Web Services, Hypermedia Resources, Non Hypermedia Resources)
• an RDF Middleware solution for RDF-zation of non RDF resources across the Web and enterprise Intranets and/or Extranets (in the form of Cartridges for data exposed via REST or SOA oriented SOAP interfaces)
• an RDF Linked Data Server (meaning it can deploy RDF Linked Data based on its native and/or virtualized data)

As result of the above, when you deploy a PHP application using Virtuoso, you inherit the following benefits:

1. Use of PHP-iODBC for in-process communication with Virtuoso
2. Easy generation of RDF Linked Data Views atop the SQL schemas of PHP applications
3. Easy deployment of RDF Linked Data from virtualized data sources
4. Less LAMP monoculture (*there is no such thing as virtuous monoculture*) when dealing with PHP based Web applications.

As indicated in prior posts, producing RDF Linked Data from the existing Web, where a lot of content is deployed by PHP based content managers, should simply come down to RDF Views over the SQL Schemas and deployment / publishing of the RDF Views in RDF Linked data form. In a nutshell, this is what Virtuoso delivers via its PHP runtime hosting and pre packaged VADs (Virtuoso Application Distribution packages), for popular PHP based applications such as: phpBB3, Drupal, WordPress, and MediaWiki.

In addition, to the RDF Linked Data deployment, we've also taken the traditional LAMP installation tedium out of the typical PHP application deployment process. For instance, you don't have to rebuild PHP 3.5 (32 or 64 Bit) on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux to get going, simply install Virtuoso, and then select a VAD package for the relevant application and you're set. If the application of choice isn't pre packaged by us, simply install as you would when using Apache, which comes dow to situating the PHP files in your Web structure under the Web Application's root directory.

Installation Guide

1. Download the Virtuoso installer for Windows (32 Bit msi file or 64 Bit msi file), Mac OS X (Universal Binary dmg file), or instantiate the Virtuoso EC2 AMI (*search for pattern: "Virtuoso when using the Firefox extension for EC2 as the AMI ID is currently: ami-7c31d515 and name: virtuoso-test/virtuoso-cloud-beta-9-i386.manifest.xml, for latest cut*)
2. Run the installer (or download the movies using the links in the related section below)
3. Go to the Virtuoso Conductor (*which will show up at the end of the installation process* or go to http://localhost:8890/conductor)
4. Go to the "Admin" tab within the (X)HTML based UI and select the "Packages" sub-menu item (a Tab)
5. Pick phpBB3 (or any other pre-packaged PHP app) and then click on "Install/Upgrase"
6. The watch one of my silent movies or read the initial startup guides for Virtuoso hosted phpBB3, Drupal, Wordpress, MediaWiki.

Related

At the current time, I've only provided links to ZIP files containing the Virtuoso installation "silent movies". This approach is a short-term solution to some of my current movie publishing challenges re. YouTube and Vimeo -- where the compressed output hasn't been of acceptable visual quality. Once resolved, I will publish much more "Multimedia Web" friendly movies :-)

• Windows Vista (x64) Installation Movie
• Mac OS X (x64 & Universal binary) Installation Movie
• Virtuoso EC2 Cloud Edition Installation Movie
• Guide for PHP based Application Deployment using Virtuoso

Runtime hosting is functionality realm of Virtuoso that is sometimes easily overlooked. In this post I want to provide a simple no-hassles HOWTO guide for installing Virtuoso on Windows (32 or 64 Bit), Mac OS X (Universal or Native 64 Bit), and Linux (32 or 64 Bit). The installation guide also covers the instantiation of phpBB3 as verification of the Virtuoso hosted PHP 3.5 runtime.

What are the benefits of PHP Runtime Hosting?

Like Apache, Virtuoso is a bona-fide Web Application Server for PHP based applications. Unlike Apache, Virtuoso is also the following:

• a Hybrid Native DBMS Engine (Relational, RDF-Graph, and Document models) that is accessible via industry standard interfaces (solely)
• a Virtual DBMS or Master Data Manager (MDM) that virtualizes heterogeneous data sources (ODBC, JDBC, Web Services, Hypermedia Resources, Non Hypermedia Resources)
• an RDF Middleware solution for RDF-zation of non RDF resources across the Web and enterprise Intranets and/or Extranets (in the form of Cartridges for data exposed via REST or SOA oriented SOAP interfaces)
• an RDF Linked Data Server (meaning it can deploy RDF Linked Data based on its native and/or virtualized data)

As result of the above, when you deploy a PHP application using Virtuoso, you inherit the following benefits:

1. Use of PHP-iODBC for in-process communication with Virtuoso
2. Easy generation of RDF Linked Data Views atop the SQL schemas of PHP applications
3. Easy deployment of RDF Linked Data from virtualized data sources
4. Less LAMP monoculture (*there is no such thing as virtuous monoculture*) when dealing with PHP based Web applications.

As indicated in prior posts, producing RDF Linked Data from the existing Web, where a lot of content is deployed by PHP based content managers, should simply come down to RDF Views over the SQL Schemas and deployment / publishing of the RDF Views in RDF Linked data form. In a nutshell, this is what Virtuoso delivers via its PHP runtime hosting and pre packaged VADs (Virtuoso Application Distribution packages), for popular PHP based applications such as: phpBB3, Drupal, WordPress, and MediaWiki.

In addition, to the RDF Linked Data deployment, we've also taken the traditional LAMP installation tedium out of the typical PHP application deployment process. For instance, you don't have to rebuild PHP 3.5 (32 or 64 Bit) on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux to get going, simply install Virtuoso, and then select a VAD package for the relevant application and you're set. If the application of choice isn't pre packaged by us, simply install as you would when using Apache, which comes dow to situating the PHP files in your Web structure under the Web Application's root directory.

Installation Guide

1. Download the Virtuoso installer for Windows (32 Bit msi file or 64 Bit msi file), Mac OS X (Universal Binary dmg file), or instantiate the Virtuoso EC2 AMI (*search for pattern: "Virtuoso when using the Firefox extension for EC2 as the AMI ID is currently: ami-7c31d515 and name: virtuoso-test/virtuoso-cloud-beta-9-i386.manifest.xml, for latest cut*)
2. Run the installer (or download the movies using the links in the related section below)
3. Go to the Virtuoso Conductor (*which will show up at the end of the installation process* or go to http://localhost:8890/conductor)
4. Go to the "Admin" tab within the (X)HTML based UI and select the "Packages" sub-menu item (a Tab)
5. Pick phpBB3 (or any other pre-packaged PHP app) and then click on "Install/Upgrase"
6. The watch one of my silent movies or read the initial startup guides for Virtuoso hosted phpBB3, Drupal, Wordpress, MediaWiki.

Related

At the current time, I've only provided links to ZIP files containing the Virtuoso installation "silent movies". This approach is a short-term solution to some of my current movie publishing challenges re. YouTube and Vimeo -- where the compressed output hasn't been of acceptable visual quality. Once resolved, I will publish much more "Multimedia Web" friendly movies :-)

• Windows Vista (x64) Installation Movie
• Mac OS X (x64 & Universal binary) Installation Movie
• Virtuoso EC2 Cloud Edition Installation Movie
• Guide for PHP based Application Deployment using Virtuoso

As previously said, we have a Virtuoso with brand new engine multithreading. It is now complete and passes its regular test suite. This is the basis for Virtuoso 5.0, to be available as the open source and commercial cuts as before.

As one benchmark, we used the TPC-C test driver that has always been bundled with Virtuoso. We ran 100000 new orders worth of the TPC-C transaction mix first with one client and then with 4 clients, each client going to its own warehouse, so there was not much lock contention. We did this on a 4 core Intel, the working set in RAM. With the old one, 1 client took 1m43 and 4 clients took 3m47. With the new one, one client took 1m30 and 4 clients took 2m37. So, 400000 new orders in 2m37, for 152820 new orders per minute as opposed to 105720 per minute previously. Do not confuse with the official tpmC metric, that one involves a whole bunch of further rules.

TPC-C has activity spread over a few different tables. With tests dealing with fewer tables, improvements in parallelism are far greater.

Aside from better parallelism, we have other features. One of them is a change in the read committed isolation, so that we now return the previous committed state for uncommitted changed rows instead of waiting for the updating transaction to terminate. This is similar to what Oracle does for read committed. Also we now do log checkpoints without having to abort pending write transactions.

When we have faster inserts, we actually see the RDF bulk loader run slower. This is really backwards. The reason is that while one thread parses, other threads insert and if the inserting threads are done they go to wait on a semaphore and this whole business of context switching absolutely kills performance. With slower inserts, the parser keeps ahead so there is less context switching, hence better overall throughput. I still do not get it how the OS can spend between 1.5 and 6 microseconds, several thousand instructions, deciding what to do next when there are only 3-4 eligible threads and all the rest is background which goes with a few dozen slices per second. Solaris is a little better than Linux at this but not dramatically so. Mac OS X is way worse.

As said, we use Oracle 10G2 on the same platform (Linux FC5 64 bit) for sparring. It is really a very good piece of software. We have written the TPC C transactions in SQL/PL. What is surprising is that these procedures run amazingly slowly, even with a single client. Otherwise the Oracle engine is very fast. Well, as I recall, the official TPC C runs with Oracle use an OCI client and no stored procedures. Strange. While Virtuoso for example fills the initial TPC C state a little faster than Oracle, the procedures run 5-10 times slower with Oracle than with Virtuoso, all data in warm cache and a single client. While some parts of Oracle are really well optimized, all basic joins and aggregates etc, we are surprised at how they could have neglected such a central piece as the PL.

Also, we have looked at transaction semantics. Serializable is mostly serializable with Oracle but does not always keep a steady count. Also it does not prevent inserts into a space that has been found empty by a serializable transaction. True, it will not show these inserts to the serializable transaction, so in this it follows the rules. Also, to make a read really repeatable, it seems that the read has to be FOR UPDATE. Otherwise one can not implement a reliable resource transaction, like changing the balance of an account.

Anyway, the Virtuoso engine overhaul is now mostly complete. This is of course an open ended topic but the present batch is nearing completion. We have gone through as many as 3 implementations of hash joins, some things have yet to be finished there. Oracle has very good hash joins. The only way we could match that was to do it all in memory, dropping any persistent storage of the hash. This is of course OK if the hash is not very large and anyway hash joins go sour if the hash does not fit in working set.

As next topics, we have more RDF and the LUBM benchmark to finish. Also we should revisit TPC-D.

Databases are really quite complicated and extensive pieces of software. Much more so than the casual observer might think.

We have updated our article on Virtuoso scalability with two new platforms: A 2 x dual core Intel Xeon and a Mac Mini with an Intel Core Duo.

We have more than quadrupled the best result so far.

The best score so far is 83K transactions per minute with a 40 warehouse (about 4G) database. This is attributable to the process running in mostly memory, with 3 out of 4 cores busy on the database server. But even when doubling the database size and number of 3 clients, we stay at 49K transactions per minute, now with a little under 2 cores busy and am average of 20 disk reads pending at all times, split over 4 SATA disks. The measurement is the count of completed transactions during a 1h run. With the 80 warehouse database, it took about 18 minutes for the system to reach steady state, with a warm working set, hence the actual steady rate is somewhat higher than 49K, as the warm up period was included in the measurement.

The metric on the Mac Mini was 2.7K with 2G RAM and one disk. The CPU usage was about one third of one core. Since we have had rates of over 10K with 2G RAM, we attribute the low result to running on a single disk which is not very fast at that.

We have run tests in 64 and 32 bit modes but have found little difference as long as actual memory does not exceed 4g. If anything, 32 bit binaries should have an advantage in cache hit rate since most data structures take less space there. After the process size exceeds the 32 bit limit, there is a notable difference in favor of 64 bit. Having more than 4G of database buffers produces a marked advantage over letting the OS use the space for file system cache. So, 64 bit is worthwhile but only if there is enough memory. As for X86 having more registers in 64 bit mode, we have not specifically measured what effect that might have.

We also note that Linux has improved a great deal with respect to multiprocessor configurations. We use a very simple test with a number of threads acquiring and then immediately freeing the same mutex. On single CPU systems, the real time has pretty much increased linearly with the number of threads. On multiprocessor systems, we used to get very non-linear behavior, with 2 threads competing for the same mutex taking tens of times the real time as opposed to one thread. At last measurement, with a 64 bit FC 5, we saw 2 threads take 7x the real time when competing for the same mutex. This is in the same ballpark as Solaris 10 on a similar system. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on a 2x dual core Xeon Mac Pro did the worst so far, with two threads taking over 70x the time of one. With a Mac Mini with a single Core Duo, the factor between one thread and two was 73.

Also the proportion of system CPU on Tiger was consistently higher than on Solaris or Linux when running the same benchmarks. Of course for most applications this test is not significant but it is relevant for database servers, as there are many very short critical sections involved in multithreaded processing of indices and the like.

I am thoroughly impressed with this product. I have been using Solaris (in its many incarnations since the mid 80's SunOS days), Windows (since Windows 2.0), Linux (since inception), FreeBSD (since inception), and Mac OS X (since its NexT days).

With the above in mind (years of getting into trouble during OS installation and usage etc.. I expected the very worst when attempting to get Solaris 10, Linux (Debian), FreeBSD 6.x, and Windows XP installed on a Mac Mini such that I could have all of these operating systems at my disposal without quad-booting. To my utter disbelief (I am still trying to recover from the immense euphoria..) Parallels delivered to me the absolute simplest installation and usage experience across all said operating systems that I have ever experienced.

I now have a MacIntel Mac Mini (one of several that I will be stocking up on while I wait the Microsoft Universal Binary port of Office) that delivers me the long sought nirvana of having Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows XP, and Mac OS X on a single desktop!

If you want to enjoy one of the genuine innovations of our time, simply make parallels an integral part of your Mac OS X experience (whether you are an end-user, developer, administrator, or systems integrator).

Parallels Desktop Release Candidate 2, uh, released: "

Filed under: OS, Software

Get your mice clicking ladies and gentlemen, as Parallels has offered up the final test version of Parallels Desktop for Mac, their virtualization software that allows you to run almost any OS right within Mac OS X. With this version, however, Parallels has increased the app's final price to $79.99, as they have incorporated their Compressor Server tool (due to user feedback) into the software package for streamlining and optimizing your virtual machines and the amount of disk space they occupy. The beta testing pre-order price of $39.99 is still in place, and probably more appetizing than ever. Other new features and improvements in the Release Candidate 2 include:

• Significantly improved performance
• Improved USB performance and broader device support
• Improved Host-guest networking
• Automatic network adapters now switch on-the-fly
• Guest OS no longer steals host IP address in some DHCP servers
• Fullscreen mode is now customizable
• Integration with Virtue is now bug-free
• Customizable Ctrl + Click mapping
• Guest 32bit color is supported when Parallels Tools is installed
• Improved Shared folders performance
• Resolved shared folders/MS Office incompatibility issues
• Windows 98 no longer consumes 99% host CPU even when idle (in VT-x mode)

Also note that if you download this newest release, you must re-install the Parallels Tools for guest Windows installations (NT/2000/XP/2003). As with previous beta releases, this download is free before the software package goes official.

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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)