WebGUI Performance Tuning

2004 WebGUI User’s Conference

The Rules

• Your mileage may vary

• Tuning can only do so much

• You can tune everything (hardware, software, network)

• Tuning WebGUI means tuning what WebGUI uses

Hardware Tuning

Pretuning• Research before you buy

• Compatibility

• Benchmarks

• Cheap hardware is usually slower

• Less cache

• Less efficient micro-controllers

Hard Disks

• The weakest link

• SCSI is faster than IDE

• RAID affects speed

• More spindles with smaller disks

Hardware Software

• Bad software slows good hardware

• Stay up to date

• drivers

• kernels

Software Tuning

Apache

• mod_perl

• KeepAlive Off

• Keeping Apache hot

• MinSpareServers

• MaxSpareServers

• StartServers

• mod_gzip

WebGUI

• Delete plug-ins from your config file that you don’t use

• Empty your trash and clipboard regularly

• Set your message board posts to be archived at intervals right for your site

HTML

• Dislocate your stylesheet to a file on the filesystem (collateral manager)

• Minimize the nesting of tables and divs

• Specify hard sizes on your images

preload.perl

• Use it!

• Add wobject, macros, and other plug-ins

• Remove the references to plug-ins you don’t use

• Enable Apache::DBI

MySQL

• Up max_connections to 1000

• Consider increasing buffers

• key_buffer=256M

• myisam_sort_buffer_size=64M

• query_buffer_size=5000

• sort_buffer=2M

• record_buffer=2M

MySQL (cont)• max_allowed_packet=16M

• Keep threads hot

• thread_cache=8

• thread_concurrency=4

• thread_stack=128K

• table_cache=512

WebGUI Caching

• Set your page caching as high as possible

• Export heavy and heavily traffic’d pages to static HTML

• Use in-memory templates if you have enough RAM

Network Tuning

Dislocate MySQL

MySQLApache /WebGUI

DBI

Replicate MySQL

MySQLMaster

Apache /WebGUI

MySQLSlave

MySQLSlaveDBI

MySQL Replication

Set Up A File Server

Apache /WebGUI

Apache /Static Files

SMB or NFS

Use a Proxy

Apache w/mod_proxy

Apache /WebGUI

HTTP

Load Balance

Apache /WebGUI

Load Balancer

Apache /WebGUI

Apache /WebGUI

File Server

HTTPNFS or SMB

Everything

Load Balancer

Apache /WebGUI

Apache /WebGUI

MySQL Master

HTTPNFS or SMBDBIMySQL Replication

Apache /Static Files

MySQL Slave

Network Setup

• Use 100MB or 1GB between servers

• Keep everything on a clean switch

• Use multiple network cards

• 1 for each server function

• 1 for utility functions such as backups and logins

Load Balancer Configuration

• Good - simple round robin

• Better - monitor processor, memory, hard disk, and network load; send requests to least used servers

• Don’t load balance on IP address

Localization

• Peer your site on as many backbones as possible

• Use local cache servers

Questions?