[support] CPU usage

[Jamie Holly]

I know Websense does pretty much the same thing as Blue Coat in "pre 
scanning" sites. The best solution is to use css compression/aggregation 
(in D5+) and javascript compression/aggregation (D6) to reduce requests. 
Those are some of the files these services latch onto, and when they 
read the entire site they won't cache the files, but rather reread them 
on every page request.This will help keep the cpu usage down since 
Apache won't have to keep spawning connections for the files.

 Also any kind of caching you can get in there. There are some scenarios 
and modules it won't work with. For example - if your Drupal install is 
in a subfolder of the web root. One way to fix that is to put Drupal on 
its own subdomain.  Also trying op-code level caching like APC is a big 
plus (generally a 20%+ increase). Another option is using something like 
cacherouter with memcache and then enabling the page caching through 
that. With apc+cache router+memcache, I can pump out over 200 requests 
per second on an old dual-core AMD server and my load never goes above 
60 using D6.

Of course if you are on shared hosting getting these things setup can be 
very difficult, if not impossible (APC and Memcache require a system 
admin to install and configure the modules). I would then look at going 
to a managed VPS (if you aren't comfortable handling your own system 
admin). Companies like wired tree have these services starting at around 
$40 (us) a month.

Jamie Holly



Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Ok, I have a little more information:
>
> All the schools in Kent county, UK (pop 1.4 mil) go through the same IP 
> address. So that's may thousand PCs. Most schools "have an ISA server on 
> site running Websense". Websense appears to be some sort of gateway 
> software, and I imagine that ISA is the Microsoft "Internet Security and 
> Acceleration" Server. I have no idea if either of these products has the 
> problems of Blue Coat.
>
> Daniel.
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