A few months ago, we posted about our plans to speed up the cPanel & WHM installer. We are excited to announce that in cPanel & WHM version 11.52 you can look forward to much faster installations on all of your new servers.
Your mileage may vary based on your server’s configuration and the speed of your internet connection, but in our testing environments, we’ve seen installation times reduced by at least 50%, with some configurations’ installation times consistently as low as 22 minutes. This is a huge improvement on the hour-minimum for installation in cPanel & WHM version 11.50, and we expect to see similarly drastic reductions “in the wild” for our customers.
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!
New installations of cPanel & WHM now use a new fast installation mode by default.
The fast installation mode includes a few changes from the previous (legacy) installation method:
- Fast installations use a precompiled default EasyApache 3 configuration that we ship as a tarball. Unless you customize EA, each installation won’t require a new EasyApache compilation.
- Fast installations use prebuilt locale databases. Because of this change, the
/scripts/build_locale_databasesscript does not run during the installation process. - Fast installations use tarballs to download certain core cPanel & WHM files. Previously, the installation process required a separate HTTP request for each file.
- Fast installations use system RPMs, if they are available, to set up the Perl
local::liblibrary. Previously, the installation process always downloaded and built these modules from CPAN.
A touchfile will allow you to turn off the fast installation mode if you really want a longer installation, but we really hope you’ll take advantage of this great new way to install cPanel & WHM!
Faster installations for everyone.
We’ve also made a few other changes that speed things up, and reduce installation-time frustration, regardless of the installation mode you use:
- Memory checks at the beginning of the installation process ensure that your server meets the minimum memory requirements for your OS.
- We now use the
xzcompression algorithm when we compress the binaries and other assets that you need to install or update cPanel & WHM. This change has drastically reduced the size of these files, saving you download time.
Ready for a preview?
If you’d like to see the new fast installation mode in action (on a development or testing server!), it’s available NOW on the EDGE release tier. To install the EDGE release tier on a non-production server, just add CPANEL=edge to the /etc/cpupdate.conf file before you start the installation process.
