Forum Speed

[TransAmDan]

Over the last couple of months, the forum has been feeling slow, and at times has come up with a response of 'resource limit reached'. the forum is on a fast web server in the UK. The resource limit seems to be memory related, too much being used and not released, suggesting a bug in the forum software or plugins. If we wanted to upgrade to the next level webserver its ?100 a month, which is for business use, and not going down the route, it may not fix the problem anyway, just mask it. Well anyway, I've been tweaking a few settings and getting it to serve parts of the website from a caching system, previously many images were. I've disabled a few plugins, that we can get by without. The site seems to feel better, and looking at the resources being used, its hardly registering now. yay.

 

[TransAmDan]

Recently I've been altering some forum code, to make pages load even faster. I've been working in the Gallery Area, even though photos are meant to be servers from a content delivery network they haven't been, to test it, took around an hour. This area is certainly faster now. I will move onto other area, like the blog, and the article section eventually. These areas wont be as easy to change. The way the forum code is written is very bity, calling up single line bis of codes via a function which is called some something else in another file. It will get there

 

[TransAmDan]

Still making some tweaks here and there. Looking deeper in to a VPS server which I will trial later on today. The site seems faster at the mo, but when we get a few people on here it slows down.
The data is held in an SQL database, due to it being on a shared server I cannot tweak the SQL server properties. By moving to a VPS I have total control over it. Therefore making it even faster. At the moment it being a shared server there could be 100 other websites all being served form the same server. The new server will have sole connection to a very whizzy internet backbone. Therefore making the end user experience very quick indeed.
I loaded a page earlier today, it was just a forum page, took 8 seconds to load, however reloading this page was in about 1 second. This was just for the HTML part of the page, not including all the little bits.
Also this will speed up the Album section, we get many visitors in here, and I have feed back from one user where it would take 14 seconds to load a page. This was the point where the server was having trouble due to the amount of people on it. Most of the time its okay though.

 

[TransAmDan]

I've been quiet on the forum for a little while. This is because I have been configuring a VPS (Virtual Private Server) for this website. Things are going well. Had to wrestle with a few things, and where the files are quite large, and having to do a find and replace in some of the settings/ and database it took some time. The reason for a find and replace its that I needed to get it working on another domain name, so it didn't bring down the current website.
The reason for a VPS is that we have a server with dedicated resources just for our website, where this current site is served from a server that 100 other website could be on. The VPS does cost more, but we have more control, and the website will be faster. By running faster then the googlebot will like the pages more, ranking higher in the search, therefore generating more visitors.
I need to run further speed tests. Things are looking promising, new VPS server is www.solentrenegades.co.uk so its the same website but without the '-' (hyphen) . The slowness experence before was seen by clicking on 'Forum' and clicking on a thread, and then clicking on 'Forum' it would sit there for a few seconds before downloading the page. The VPS seems faster.
However at the moment the VPS is serving the images too so will be a little slower, however it is handling it pretty quick and almost on par with the current site which is using a content delivery network (caching system geared up for serving images fast)

All users can go on the duplicate forum, and post, you will need to sign in again as technically its a different website, I've copied all of the users across. However what you post on this will be lost when the switch over happens (after further speed and stress tests) at the moment tests are looking good. It will be at least another week before I'm totally happy with it.

My aim in all this is to keep it one of the best car club websites around, fast, and full of information.

 

[TransAmDan]

Speed testing of a regular forum page on the current server takes 1.69 seconds to serve the page, no including any other files like the style sheet and images.



speed testing using the newer VPS server takes 0.339 seconds to serve the page. That's 4.98 times faster in this example.


Wahoo, whizzy stuff.

 

[sarah]

It is alot whizzier

 

[TransAmDan]

Thanks, I aim to please.
I'll make a list in the other thread of things needing to be looked at. Like you mentioned some of the facebook links aren't working when you publish something.

I done a stress test on the website, with 50 users on there, a page would completely load in 15 seconds on the new website. the old one when it went over 20 users this particular test shot up to over 60 seconds per page. It seems to handle the load better.

 

[Darren]

You've been busy, it certainly seems way faster

 

[TransAmDan]

Gave the new VPS server some load testing earlier. Continuous testing for 5 mins, it downloaded 5200 pages in that 5 mins, works out to 17 pages per second. It was still serving pages between 1/3rd of a second to 8 seconds on average it was 1.2 seconds during this high load. This is a heck of a lot of traffic, during the whole day before wheels day was out peek time so far this year, 6800 pages were served in the 24 hours.

I'm almost tempted to move the website to the new server tonight, as all testing seems to prove its a better way to go. Users wont need to do anything, this all happens in the background and its still the same website address.

 

[TransAmDan]

New backup solution for new server is in the process of being sorted. Don't want to loose things. As now everything is pretty much set up and ready to go. I will take a backup onto my lappa, as its needed to transfer everything for the new server. I will be doing the management of the server, where on the old server someone else was doing the backups. Although the new server is whizzy, it does have some cost saving too. Also room to grow, currently is the website space gets over 8Gb in size i would have to pay more, currenly uts just over 4Gb. We want to be able to add a lot more photos, and the new one, even base size is 15Gb, so almost double, and giving us almost 4 times the space we are currently using. The backup solution will store up to 25Gb, so we are well in there.

 

[TransAmDan]

Well you are all on the new server now. Let me know if you experience any issues. :yo:

 

[matt 103]

we need to get more people to use it now

 

[TransAmDan]

Yeah, I agree with that. We are getting a lot of passing visitors. I'm sure many of our club members have internet connection. perhaps I will ask around and see what people want to see on a website so it can be improved for people to keep checking back from time to time.

 

[TransAmDan]

Looking at memory usage it goes almost to the 1GB limit when viewing many pages.


When its in a dormant like state its using around 700Mb. so this is probably the operating system. so we have 300Mb for the website to run, which should be plenty but occasionally i get an Error 500, which I'm looking into.
It looks like it exceeds the memory limit from time to time.

 

[TransAmDan]

When it gets near to the memory limit it slows down. Another 512Mb will be added some time today, this should sort the issues. Hopefully it will be done over night.

 

[TransAmDan]

The upgrade should be happening between now and 9am. They will need to reboot the web server, so we will be offline for around 15mins. This should be the last upgrade for some time.

 

[TransAmDan]

Results of a speed test this morning on the website reveals a great improvement from last week.

Speed test done on Blazemeter.com testing around 5 webpages on the site.

Set up the test to start of with a couple of simulated users and then ramp up to 50 people over 30mins an then stay at 50 users for a further 35 mins.
The Dark green line is the response time from today. So on average around 1.2 seconds. Where the previous results from the 29th April were Around 5 seconds or more.

The main speed improvement recently done was installing the APC caching system, this was a bit fiddly and I generated a tread(http://www.solent-renegades.co.uk/recent-changes/6457-forum-caching-system.html#post20062) while installing it and fiddling with settings. It seems to be reliable and I'm well impressed with the speed results.

:nod:

 

[TransAmDan]

Well I ran the testing once again, as been tuning the caching system. No APC cache anymore, using XCache, 128Mb PHP cache and 256Mb Variable cache. Also running Memcache of 256Mb which only Google Pagespeed mod has access too.

Page load times of 0.9 seconds now, where before it was 1.2seconds. Using the same previous graph as shown above. The thick green line is the new speeds.
working good.

 

[TransAmDan]

In the quest to make the forum faster, yes I know, I'm on it again. You know when something work, you just have to fiddle, well I@m getting that itch again.

The website is in PHP, vBulletin(the forum package) isn't very optimised, so any way to speed it up will be handy. The quicker it can do things the better it will perform when there is a rush of people. Anyway, The PHP is running as an Apache Module, although there are two other choices CGI and FastCGI. After reading this article:- How to change PHP install from being CGI to Apache Module? - cPanel Forums

FastCGI/FCGI -- These are actually two different flavors of PHP but I will lump them together because they are so very similar. Originally, this was essentially just a higher performance versions of phpSuExec but it has since evolved substantially and today this is much more like a higher performance version of SuPHP in that its security is now very nearly identical to that of SuPHP though it is a bit more complicated to configure and maintain and not as well suited to handle large numbers of web sites on the same server machine but it's strengths lie very heavily in its ability to handle larger and more heavy traffic sites with a lot more simultaneous users and this is also the PHP flavor with the fastest performance of all the PHP types. It is a very good choice if you have a few sites on your server or a really busy web site with a lot of visitors. The technical differences are quite fascinating from a programmer's perspective but that is definitely beyond the scope of this post which is really just meant as rough draft overview to answer your question.

My first choice in the case of vBulletin would be FGI/FastCGI and might also look into a caching accelerator like X-Cache or similar to push the performance bar a bit further. The second choice on the totem pole behind that would be SuPHP behind that.

However when I enable the FastCGI the forum appeared to work but had some permission errors. i think thats something to play with another day.

 

[AmericanThunder]

Thanks Dan, I've always stayed clear of PHP etc so can't offer any help.
Its interesting, but if me and Clare are both on the forum on our respective iPads one of us usually experiences a really slow connection. If the one who has a slow connection swtiches to 4G the problem goes away. Its only the 'gades forum where this happens. Its as though it doesn't like two IP addresses the same.
Its not a problem as its quite rare we are both browsing the forum at the same time but it does happen.