We recently helped a client install PDFLite on their server and it was a little more quirky than usual so we thought we’d share the installation process.

First of all, PDF Lite is the stripped down but free version of PDFLib. This library allows you to generate PDF files and can be quite handy. The easiest thing is to confuse the two versions, we’re using the Lite version which doesn’t have as many features but it’s free and doesn’t watermark your PDFs. The Lite version is good for just messing around with but if this is a commercial endeavor, you should get the full version found here : http://www.pdflib.com/

This tutorial installs the FREE Lite package version 7.03. Alright, let’s get started:
OS: CentOS 4.5/5,RHEL 4/5
Requires: PECL to be running and available and most likely has to be done as the root user

cd /usr/src
wget http://www.pdflib.com/binaries/PDFlib/703/PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
tar xzpf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3
./configure
make
make install
pecl install pdflib

The system will now ask you for the installation location of pdflib (path to pdflib installation?), put in:
/usr/local

Once it’s done installing, let’s finish this up:
cp /usr/local/lib/libpdf.so /usr/include/php/ext
echo "[libpdf]" >> /etc/php.ini
echo "extension=pdf.so" >> /etc/php.ini
service httpd restart

That should do it, check your phpinfo to make sure it works and go make some PDFs.

We’ll do a complete tutorial in this blog series. Hopefully we can get this done in 3 main blog posts and then an accompanying post with some information about using Memcache in other common PHP scripts such as vBulletin, IPBoard, Joomla, etc.

Part 1 – Install Memcache
Part 2 – Install eAcclerator
Part 3 – Modify WordPress to use Memcache + eAccelerator

PART 1 of 3: Memcache
Memcache aka Memcached is:

...a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load

In layman’s terms, it’s a caching system using RAM to cache your website and make it run quicker. Why would Memcache speed up your site? It basically takes your often hit pages and caches it into RAM. By caching it into RAM, your page doesn’t need to be regenerated as the information is still in memory. Large websites have huge Memcache server farms whose sole purpose is to cache data for quick retrieval, that’s how the big boys do it. Even Howard Stern uses Memcache.

Well we might not have millions of hits and gigabytes of Memcache but even a little bit of Memcache can help medium traffic sites. No, memcache is not for everybody, it doesn’t do you much good if your site doesn’t see much traffic. But if you have a popular WordPress Blog or vBulletin forum, a little Memcache can go a long way.

We have found that Memcache + eAccelerator greatly increases the speed of your site and reduces the overall server load. So you might ask, how do I get Memcache working with WordPress, let’s get started:

NOTE: This article assumes that you have root/admin access to your server. If you are on a hosted/shared webserver, just ask your hosting company to do the work for you and skip to the WordPress Memcache plugin section.
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