[consulting] Server Specs

[Eric Tucker]

----- "FGM" <fgm at osinet.fr> wrote: 
> From: "FGM" <fgm at osinet.fr> 
> To: "A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers" <consulting at drupal.org> 
> Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 7:33:09 AM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central 
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Server Specs 
> 
> 3 sec/page, authentified, is high. So is 500ms anonymous. 
> 
> You might want to make sure: 
> - you have correctly enabled your page cache, at least at the "normal" 
> level. 
> - you have enabled and set up APC 
> - you have tuned MySQL beyond its usual default configuration, which is most 
> of the time set up for a tiny embedded server like a set-top-box. 
> - you have not been writing queries in your theme, not doing anything heavy 
> in hook_init(), and not implementing hook_boot() (simplifying). 
> 

I have run a high traffic site with a good bit of dynamic generation going on. I second all of this. 

Here are the things we did to tune for a massive number of hits. Some or all of the following will help you out, but you can probably get away with picking just a few. 

(1) InnoDB in MySQL is your friend for performance. (To some this may seem counterintuitive, but we found this to work in practice.) 

(2) We have a few tricks up our sleeve with regard to caching. Behaviors that keep the whole cache from being flushed all at once are a definite win, and I'm sure Drupal does this out of the box to an extent. I'd might be able to expound on this later on some of the more exotic approaches or if someone would like to drop me an off-list email. 

(3) Avoid caching in the database. Use memcached or something else. 

(4) If you're running more than one box, watch the latency on your network and quality of your switches. We invested in good quality Cisco gigabit switches with a moderately high packet forwarding rate, and it *did* make a difference. 

(5) Offload images by putting Varnish or Squid in front. They're a lot more efficient at serving images than Apache in my experience, and we saw noticeable differences. 

(6) Add indicies to the database as appropriate. 

(7) If not already off, turn off DNS look-ups in Apache. 

(8) Pay attention to IO. Make sure your database has enough IO horsepower. SSD's are a real win here for the money though reliability is still unproven. It's those occasional events that hit the IO hard that can cause real issues. 

(9) If you're running your site around the clock, turn off pesky processes (some of which run by default as part of most Linux distros) or relegate them to your low traffic hours. We have always had some issues with this kind of thing as there's never a perfect time to saturate the IO. 

> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Fred Jones" <fredthejonester at gmail.com> 
> To: "A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers" 
> <consulting at drupal.org> 
> Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 2:17 PM 
> Subject: [consulting] Server Specs 
> 
> 
> I am looking at site built by a Drupal newbie and I am trying to fix 
> it up. Truth is aside from the theme, the rest of the site appears 
> normal. And the theme I am fixing up. 
> 
> Now the issue is a new server because the current server is quite 
> slow. The site gets around 200K pageviews a month, with a high day 
> getting 30K. I calculate that if we presume around 15 hours of that 
> day are busy, that's 2K per hour. That comes out to something like a 
> page every 2 seconds. I am not an expert in busy sites, but I think 
> this is not too bad actually and that any decent VPS or dedicated 
> server *should* be able to handle it. 
> 
> I turned on devel and I see page execution times of 3 seconds on 
> average, however. I think that's very high. I will try to analyze if I 
> can and see what's slowing down this site, but in the meantime here 
> are my questions: 
> 
> 1. People agree that 3 seconds is very high? Yes, yes it depends on 
> the theme and modules etc. etc. The theme is (now) a fairly standard 
> Zen sub-theme, nothing special in particular. There are a lot of 
> modules but it seems that node pages render as fast as views pages. 
> There are now 30K nodes but I think they want to import a lot more. 
> The mysqldump file is around 650M. Not huge I think. 
> 
> 2. Can anyone give any advice regarding specs for a new server? Or at 
> least confirm that any reasonable machine with reasonable specs should 
> be OK? 
> 
> Thanks, 
> Fred 
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