system performance

Handy note to keep ready for the boss when he asks if we should upgrade to Vista or not.

InfoWorld:  Our tests show that Windows Vista and Office 2007 not only smash Redmond’s previous records for weight gain, but given the same hardware diet, run at less than half the speed of generation XP.

Now, to be honest I really do like Microsoft's Office 2007 and most of my people would give it a thumbs up.  It is Vista that I have a hard time accepting.  How do you justify Microsoft's Vista in the office...especially when everything just seems to run slower on Vista..

"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television, I know because I designed it."

- Larry Roberts, ARPANet and Telnet founder, quoted in "Its Creators Call Internet Outdated, Offer Remedies", Wall Street Journal, Oct 2, 2007

I'm in the middle of upgrading my VPS server from PHP 5.1.6 to PHP 5.2.1.  So if you don't hear from me anytime soon...you now have an explanation.

Actually, I'm not too worried about breaking the server.  I am however worried about breaking a few of the applications that may not be compatible with PHP 5.2.  Also, about half the time I recompile Apache through Cpanel on the server I find I also need to spend some time  also restoring eAccelerator.  The worry has nothing to do with whether I'm up to the challenge but more of a time issue.  I don't know what it is, but everything in my IT world seems to be hitting at once.   Anyway, here goes...

Updated: 1:35 PM CDT:  So far I haven't seen any conflicts between PHP 5.2.1 and the applications I'm running on the server.  I did have to raise the memory_limit in my php.ini and  make a new install of eAccelerator.  It cost me a little bit of lunch time, but that is about it.

Updated: 316 PM CDT:  Wow, all my sites on this server seem to be zipping along.  Perhaps the observed performance boost is due only to a reboot of the server, but I'd like to think that it has something to do performance improvements in PHP 5.2.1.  One additional change I also did was remove the Microsoft Frontpage Server extensions.  I haven't used Frontpage in years.

2bits is spending a lot of time lately discussing how best to manage a high traffic Drupal site.  This particular article on Drupal's built-in caching caught my attention.

As a site grows, the overhead of executing so many queries per page against the database starts to add up. This is where caching can benefit a high traffic site. Drupal core caching Caching stores "elements" in a cache table in the database, so the data can be retrieved by a single query, rather that constructing the page from individual elements. Drupal's core cache has two parts, stuff that gets caches no matter what, and stuff that is optional via an administrator defined settings.

Complete Story

A great article posted on 2bits regarding the use of PHP accelerators: PHP op-code caches / accelerators: Drupal large site case study.  While the article uses Drupal for the case study, the use of PHP op-code caches/accelerators such as eAccelerator and APC should benefit any PHP-based application on the server.

For a large Drupal site, one of the biggest performance boosts one can do is to install an op-code cache/accelerator. PHP op-code caches / Accelerators Since PHP is an interpreted language, every page access has to load the script, parse it, compile it into op-codes, then execute it. This load/parse/compile cycle can add up to a lot of processing time, specially when you have lots of page accesses.  Op-code caches/accelerators eliminate this load/parse/compile time, by doing so once, and keeping the compiled version of the script in memory (or disk) and use it next time a page requests this script.

You'll want to especially take a look in the article at the CPU and memory usage comparisons between using and not using op-code caching.  The writer also hints that eAccelerator may use less CPU and memory usage than APC.  I personally like eAccelerator over APC, but either one is a must have if you run your site on a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server.  I run CMS Report using eAccelerator on a VPS I manage through Dakota Hosting.

I don't know too much about the author of this post but he does make some semi-intelligent arguments regarding Drupal that shouldn't be entirely dismissed.  Also strange that this Drupal post is the first and only post on this Wordpress blog (so far).

4 Problems with Drupal

Drupal is an open source CMS. It it used by many big-name websites, like The Onion and the Mozilla Foundation’s Get Firefox campaign. However, it suffers from a few serious problems which make it extremely difficult to adapt to large, complex sites. If you’re looking to deploy something like a social network using Drupal then this article is definitely worth your read. Even if you’re not, these are facts any developer or admin should know about the software they might be using.  Read More...

I'd like to see some comments from others in the Drupal community before I make comments myself.  I should also mention that I originally came across this post on Amy Stephen's blog who frequently visits my site.  Amy Stephen is a Joomla! fan, but I don't think she is really trying to stir up trouble.  Of course I have to ask, can you really trust a Joomla! user?   And yes Dean, this is how you are supposed to write sarcasm.