Re: Inadequate hosting for www.postgresql.org

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004, Dave Page wrote:

>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Mitch Pirtle [mailto:mitch(dot)pirtle(at)gmail(dot)com]
>> Sent: 03 November 2004 16:58
>> To: Alexey Borzov
>> Cc: Oleg Bartunov; Marc G. Fournier; Dave Page;
>> pgsql-www(at)postgresql(dot)org
>> Subject: Re: [pgsql-www] Inadequate hosting for www.postgresql.org
>>
>> And several people have offered over the last few months,
>> including myself. I am thinking about a dual xeon with 1 GB
>> RAM that has a load average of 0.01... Nightly backups too,
>> with disk a non-factor. I asked about bandwidth usage
>> estimates but never got that far :-(
>>
>> This I simply do not understand. If there is a need for
>> dedicated hardware, and it is being offered, then why is it
>> not being accepted?
>> Didn't CommandPrompt also offer dedicated hardware?
>>
>> Not wanting to start another heated debate, just wanting to
>> understand what the deal is - as this topic keeps getting
>> regurgitated without a conclusion.
>
> The problem is not the hardware from what Marc & I can tell - the
> current hardware (a dual PIII with 4GB) is just ticking along with
> little load, and the current website performs quite nicely. What we seem
> to have is a php performance issue that we haven't tracked down yet
> which only noticably affects the beta site. Yes, we can throw more
> hardware at it if it really comes down to it (I can also rustle
> something pretty nippy up), but it makes more sense to figure out why
> we're having this problem in the first place.

Just to add to this ... if you go to
http://www.postgresql.org/index-test.php, at the bottom there are
'timings' that I've added to the code ... my last load looked like (with
mmcache enabled):

loading globals.php: 0.135524
loading loading news : 0.015047
loading loading events: 0.013862
total load time: 0.165179

A total of .16sec to load that page ... but, if you notice when you go
that page, it 'hangs' on start up for a few seconds ...

turning off mmcache, the numbers get even better:
loading globals.php: 0.082831
loading loading news : 0.020089
loading loading events: 0.008389
total load time: 0.111649

a hang that isn't apparent if you go to http://www.postgresql.org (a
static page) ...

Alexey's site uses *alot* more PHP then the current page does, so it shows
up the issue alot more ...

Now, to any PHP gurus that might be out there ... FreeBSD ports recently
went to an 'extensions' format for php ... so, you build apache, you add
in mod_php4, and then for the various extensions you want, you have a
/usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini file that you enable/disable in ... when
Apache forks off a new Child process, is it loading all of those up again,
each time? Or, even better, does it only load up the PHP stuff when a
pages calls for it? ie. a .html wouldn't load in the mod_php, but a .php
would have to load it all up before it could run? Would that load time be
the 'lag' we're seeing?

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664