[consulting] Server Specs

[Sam Tresler]

Hi Fred,

   1) Yes, three seconds is too high to render a page.
   2) A beefy VPS Should be able to handle this - however, in talking about hosting I always point out that *able to* does not mean that is the best plan.  For example, you might consider two smaller VPS'es to offload that database operations.  In order to make a reliable recommendation you'd to provide considerably more data to anyone doing the recommendation.  Off list may be better for that.

   Current performance best practices for Drupal rely a lot on external technologies for caching.  APC, memcache, Varnish are good starters, for most sites (not all!, it depends on your traffic patterns). Then in Drupal look to the mysql slow query log, make sure your CSS and JS aggregation are working as expected, and then start analyzing specific page elements.

   I won't spam the list, but I do some work for a managed VPS company specializing in the LAMP stack.  Ping me off list of you want details.

Sam Tresler
646-246-8403


On Wed, 30 Mar 2011, Fred Jones wrote:

> 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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