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Features / Usability

Features / Usability


Accellerating Tiki Installation

posts: 27

I am very pleased with the way my Tiki installation has been coming along. It is a bit slow on my server however. What effects the speed most disk or processor? My server is a Power Macintosh G4 400MHz with 2G of SDRAM PC133 & two 25G IDE hard drives via an ATA/66 bus.

Would I get more speed striping the drives or switching the machine to a dual processor (have a dual 450MHz as well)? Not sure if collecting information from all the tables into a dynamic page or the cpu building that page from the table data is more the bottleneck.

I have many other simpler PHP applications that I have been testing and using and they fly like the wind on this system. But then again, they don't have 161 tables in their databases!

Mac OS X Server 10.2.6
Apache 1.3.27
MySQL 4.0.15
PHP 4.3.3

T1 internet connection

Thanks for any thoughts!

posts: 4
My guess is processor. I s'pose you could check the system when you log on and see if there's massive hard drive usage, or something. If you're low on mem, it could be swapping a lot. I dunno. Either way, I don't think it's the disk..

posts: 27
I was thinking it might be disk as it has to rummage through all the different database tables to get the data to generate the dynamic data for the page it needs to build to fulfill the visitor's request. I suppose the easiest test would be to install it on the dual processor model and see what a difference that makes.

posts: 27
Spoke with a friend of mine that deals with larger servers and databases. He says disk, so I am going to set up a Raid and see how well that helps.

posts: 224 Ireland

I would definatively say I/O. I don't think your processor should have only problem coping with the load. But don't forget Tiki uses 4 layers in total to get the information on your screen:

mysql -> php -> smarty -> httpd

I think the 'mysql' and 'smarty' layers are the most problematic ones.

Regards,

Pat.


posts: 7

Have you tried using a php accelerator? Zend or Ion Cube's PHPA? Also, what about increasing mem allotted to php. In my installation, the default was 8 Mb - grrrr...

Cheers,

The Banana


posts: 27

I haven't any experience with the solutions you mention. I am hopeful it is a disk issue as other PHP apps I run fly, but are much simpler. I hope to have the elements I need to install the Raid by this weekend and will report the results here.

> thebanana:
> Have you tried using a php accelerator? Zend or Ion Cube's PHPA? Also, what about increasing mem allotted to php. In my installation, the default was 8 Mb - grrrr...
>
> Cheers,
>
> The Banana


posts: 7

just FYI then:

From what I last recall reading, php accelerators are basically caching mechanisms (well, Zend's is more than that but I won't go into details here).

In ionCube's PHPA at least, the speed improvement happens because the PHPA zend extension (a simple entry in your php.ini) caches the compiled versions of unchanged scripts. That way, (according to ionCube):

"... by caching, the Accelerator eliminates:

* reading of source code
* parsing of source code
* compiled code generation
* many memory allocation and copying operations
* disk related operations

..."


posts: 27

Very interesting info on PHP accelerators. I actually was working on the Tiki using a brand new Powerbook G4 I was setting up for a client and I found it to be much faster, so is it possible the speed issue is a client side issue? My laptop is much older and slower. I have had PC users say the Tiki I set up is a tad slow for them as well, though they were using a fairly new Dell laptop P4.

At any rate, I hope to test the Raid configuration this weekend and will let you know the results.


posts: 27

I had promised to update this post when I had installed the Raid on my server and here is my info.

We decided to get a hardware Raid card for my wife's Photoshop workstation and some big new drives for that system. The speed improvement was dramatic in this case with benchmarks showing a 4-5 fold speed increase in some operations. On the server, I tried software Raid with some of the drives we already had available and the performance was rather dismal so I did not attempt Tiki with that. I did get a 40G 7200rpm ATA-133 drive from my wife's workstation that had a 2mb cache. This drive was well over twice as fast as the 5400rpm drives I had in the server. The result was a significant speed boost in the Tiki. It is not instant, but it is quite reasonable in my page redraws while previously it was somewhat painful.

So I can definitively say that disk speed is an important factor in the performance of your Tiki installation.


posts: 1001 Canada

I created a page so that those results do not get lost in data flow (you should always do try to do that).
TikiBoostingHardware


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