Performance Tuning

[jon_l]

I'm having big problems with response times with my website. We run two applications - OSC and Xoops, with about 9,000 page views and 300mb data a day, on average. This doesn't seem a particularly high load, yet the response times, especially from OSC, are at times very poor.

 

The performance seems to vary during the day. At certain times the reponse times are excellent, yet at most times they are pretty poor. The problem seems to be around mySQL driven pages, as static pages load quickly. I'm guessing there is a problem with the mySQL configuration, probably with the cache settings.

 

Can anyone provide some help as to what I should be looking at, or for, to identify what is causing the problem? Are there any good monitoring tools?

 

The website is running on a 'virtual server', so we have full access.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Jon.

[Guest]

A link to the site might make it easier to make suggestions.

 

Do you have category product counts (the numbers next to the category names in the categories infoBox) turned off in admin? Did you add new indexes to the database for all columns (e.g. orders_id and products_id in the orders_products table) that are used in where, group by, and order by clauses in your MySQL queries?

 

Hth,

Matt

[jon_l]

Thanks for the fast response. I'm getting a bit stressed by this as the Christmas period is obviously our busiest part of the the year, and we could be losing sales due to the poor performance.

 

The category product counts have been removed, as has the page view count. The images we use are quite large, but a thumbnail mod was added (which did give a massive reduction in bandwidth).

 

I have seen other suggestions for features that can be removed to improve performance (best sellers, also bought for example), but I don't really want to lose these from the site. I can't see anything else that can be removed.

 

I don't think that any extra indexes have been added (I don't remember adding any). Is there a list of the best columns to index?

 

I was looking at the mySQL table_cache parameter which is set to 64. The mySQL documentation suggests increasing this if opened_tables is high. It doesn't say what a high opened_tables count is, but our figure is currently 46569.

 

Thanks,

 

Jon.

[Guest]

Indexes suggestions

MySQL configuration suggestions

Cache configuration suggestion

 

Hth,

Matt