After a little help from the #postgres IRC channel on freenode, I also had an all-SQL approach to finding username portions based on 3-character tokens generated from the entire username. Yes, this index took a while to build, but that's not the point.

The point is that now I have a stored procedure that does a 2-part lookup, one using PostgreSQL's token search, the other doing an ILIKE comparison based on the 3-character token bits, finds a unique list of matches via DISTINCT, limits the count, and then loops through the result set adding my own bold tags to the results, and returns the entire set in under 100ms.

I was able to get Nginx up and running with the ngx_postgres module, and it works well for our application, but some caching around the results would be nice. I'm waiting to hear back from the author of ngx_postgres and the author of the srcache-nginx-module project to see if they have additional insights as to why using srcache is trying to force an SSL connection to Postgres. Once we can add that caching layer, this setup should scream.]]> http://iandouglas.com/2011/01/05/nginx-and-postgres-fts/feed/ 0 http://iandouglas.com/2010/01/20/howto-redirect-iphoneipod-users-on-nginx/ http://iandouglas.com/2010/01/20/howto-redirect-iphoneipod-users-on-nginx/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:44:46 +0000 ian douglas http://iandouglas.com/?p=35 I learned a little something about nginx, a small footprint web server that is ideal for serving up mobile sites, or sites where you don’t want the heavy usage of Apache. Today, I needed to solve a problem where we redirected iPhone/iPod users to a different URL. Since nginx doesn’t use the old-style mod_rewrite rules, I had to learn how to enable redirection in the server.

Since nginx was already compiled with redirection support, I simply had to locate the correct configuration file and add a few lines of code, and away it went.

First, I checked out /etc/nginx/ and opened the site configuration file within the /sites-enabled/ path. For this example, let’s say the site was m.iandouglas.com:

# vi /etc/conf/nginx/sites-enabled/m.iandouglas.com

In here, I’d look for the ‘server’ block and add my redirection rules:

server {
	listen      80;
	server_name m.iandouglas.com;
        root /var/www/m.iandouglas.com/public;

	# redirect iPhone/iPod users to the new iphone site
        if ($http_user_agent ~* '(iPhone|iPod)') {
                rewrite ^/$ http://m.iandouglas.com/iphone/index.html;
        }
.
.
.

Then a simple nginx restart:

# /etc/init.d/nginx restart

… and we were all set.