Comments on: Kiwiblog Server upgrade

By: PaulL

PaulL — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 04:10:04 +0000

Much faster. Very good work.

By: David Farrar

David Farrar — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:56:26 +0000

The blog does has WP Cache installed and this has improved performance. The plugins are pretty much take them or leave them. As I said, if anyone wants to write a new plugin just wave your hand!

By: ghostwhowalks3

ghostwhowalks3 — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:26:12 +0000

Berend , KB is probably the highest load of any ‘kiwi blog’. So there wouldnt be any one here to optimise to start with, ie been there done that.
Now if it was crystal oscillators it would be a different story

By: berend

berend — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 07:34:23 +0000

Quad Core Xeon, 8Gbytes of Ram, and hardware Raid 10 disk array, just to run a blog? Boy, is it wordpress or is it that people who can optimize things have left the country?

By: PaulL

PaulL — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 06:30:29 +0000

Rex: very funny.

labrator – interesting, doesn’t sound that hard to change. I’m presuming the karma plugin gets called once for each comment, so it isn’t possible to rewrite it as a single query? So you need some way for persistent storage within the page, allowing the karma plugin to retrieve the whole page up front, and just return from cache for all the remaining comments on the page? Shouldn’t be too hard to write.

By: Rex Widerstrom

Rex Widerstrom — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 06:13:24 +0000

103PapPap says:

In today’s world you simply through it into production and if it can’t handle the work load then tough luck for the users.

Don’t be dissin’ Bill Gates like that, PapPap. It’s not his fault he’s got filthy rich on the back of software so fundamentally unfit-for-purpose that if there were any justice in the world he’ll one day be hooked up to some sort of life support system, only to discover it’s running the latest version of Windows.

By: dime

dime — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 06:02:41 +0000

nice! very nice! 8 gigs of ram! oh yeah!! this is like porn.. go to 32 gig now! ya know youre gonna need it

By: labrator

labrator — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:45:29 +0000

The karma php code creates 1 entry per comment and hits the database once for each comment. 90 comments = 90+ hits of the database per page load! That’s the problem with modular architecture, simplicity often beats efficiency. You’d need to rewrite the karma code to cache the karma results because if you try and change the db structure for efficiency, you can’t upgrade to new versions of wordpress. Would love to know if the indexes are being rebuilt every couple of hours too.

By: Barnsley Bill

Barnsley Bill — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:38:12 +0000

Oops, on the wrong thread. This is obviously the thread for balding single men who still live with their mothers.
I must go straight to a sports site to cleanse myself of this nerdy nonsense.
Goodbye.

By: PaulL

PaulL — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:49:38 +0000

Hmmm. Good idea Simon.

By: Simon Lyall

Simon Lyall — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:42:20 +0000

I suspect there are a few things you could do to reduce the load. For instance I’m a looking at this story and I can’t see the pools, logged in users etc but the scripts to create them are still being run. You should disabled these properly on pages where they are not being used.

By: PaulL

PaulL — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:39:24 +0000

Now that is a geek war. Get some real iron, you need a zSeries. Serve whatever you want off one of those…..

By: holdenrepublic

holdenrepublic — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:11:49 +0000

Bevan: Only because they underspec

By: Chris S

Chris S — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:56:34 +0000

David, stupid question, but do you have WordPress Caching enabled? If you don’t, that will probably help a lot – depending, of course, where your bottleneck is.

Obviously throwing more hardware at the problem will help, but WordPress is notorious for being unable to handle heavy loads – especially when they come in burst. This is a problem with dynamic pages in general, every hit results in sometimes dozens of DB queries, but I’m sure you know this.

Static Page generation is a huge plus of the Movable Type platform, that you incidentally moved away from… Also, will you be upgrading to WordPress 2.5? I hear that has many improvements as well

By: Bevan

Bevan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:40:40 +0000

HP > IBM in price only.

By: holdenrepublic

holdenrepublic — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:03:01 +0000

HP > IBM? yeah, for printers, PCs and other low-margin gear… which is why we don’t make them anymore.

By: labrator

labrator — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:01:44 +0000

At the bottom of this pages source I had "Dynamic Page Served (once) in 1.282 seconds". That seems like a hell of a long time to generate a page! I hope you try rebuilding your indexes(especially the karma and comments table) before you upgrade the server, just to get an apple to apple comparison. Your new server will automatically have it's indexes rebuilt when you install it making the server seem alot faster than it possibly is. This is assuming you don't rebuild your indexes all the time anyway.

By: MarkS

MarkS — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 01:57:37 +0000

As PaulL says, those 53XX Clovertown chips are around 4 times as fast as the 3GHz hyper-threaded P4s (or perhaps even more). I’ve deployed onto a Dell that has two of these – 8 cores in total. The cost was (comparatively speaking) ridiculously cheap for the performance. Most of the cost was in the memory (it has 32GB – those 4GB ECC DIMMS were over the top for my needs). Total cost was almost $20K but would have been under $10K if it hadn’t have been for the memory – 16GB would have been plenty.

By: infused

infused — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 01:42:07 +0000

HP > IBM

By: Lee C

Lee C — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 01:23:52 +0000

oh yes. Congratulations, David.