[Tilesathome] the use of apache to run the processing loop

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

>> it appears that a script is running to execute the tiles processing loop 
>> that uses wget to launch a php script via the apache module.
>> this seems to me like a waste of resources, considering the machine has 
>> the php executable available.
> 
> Yes, it certainly is a waste of resources. I tried running the script locally with php but it would just exit without comment and not do anything. OJW suspects it needs http environment variables to run. Looking into why it can't be run locally would definitly be good. Are you volunteering? :-)

Since I now have a dev account (yippieh!), I looked at that and I 
suspect that the script that runs through apache is run on php4 
(/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php4.load) while your attempt at using the 
commandline was with php5:

fred at dev:~$ php -v
PHP 5.2.0-8+etch7 (cli) (built: Jul  2 2007 21:46:15)

A php4 commandline package is available but not installed. The php4 
configuration is in /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini while the php5 
configuration is in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini; both are too dissimilar to do 
a diff, but it seems that:

* php4 has an "imagick" extension configured, php5 has not (but 
php5-imagick is available)
* php4 has "ingres" support, php5 has not
* php5 has the "mysqli" extension installed, php4 has not

Also, but this is not from config files but from dpkg -l, php4 seems to 
have the extensions "gd", "curl", and "domxml" installed. The first two 
are available for php5 but not installed; the "domxml" extension is not 
availalble for php5 (but probably built-in).

To cut the long story short - it may be easiest to install the php4-cli 
package and copy /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini to /etc/php4/cli/php.ini 
afterwards, then re-try.

Or migrate everything to php5.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'