Improving the responsiveness of the server

[Yogesh Sarkar]

I have a vbulletin forum running vbseo as well, right now I am thinking of caching just the images, javascripts and css files. In such a scenario what will I need to do (running WHM server with Apache Config).

[Yogesh Sarkar]

I am looking to improve the responsiveness of my Litespeed server, it is running on an E-1230 V2 with 16GB of RAM and normal SATA drives and have memcache running also eaccelerator in disk cache made.

Server load is usually quite low and so is memory usage and I have been playing around with various settings but not having much luck, here is what the response to forum’s home page looks like.



These are the settings which I am using






In particular, looking to improve the serving of static files (hoping to cache them into RAM).

[webizen]

LSWS out of box settings (such as AIO 1M) should be already optimized for static file serving.

make sure no heavy process running (use 'top -c' to check).

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Which is why I am a little bit surprised, since the php files seems to take less time to start getting downloaded than the smaller files.

Have checked at various times during the day, even when the load is miniscule (we rarely hit more than 1.5 at peak on 4 core HT server in any case) and scenario is pretty much the same.

[webizen]

try disable compression.

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Had tried doing that and although starts the page render phase a little bit faster, but doesn't do anything for the state file serving speed.

My guess as of now is that since these images have long expire values, only new visitors are being served with them and hence these aren’t getting cached because somewhat fewer requests for them. Additionally, SATA drive might just also be hurting fast retrieval of smaller images.

[NiteWave]

the load time 2.991s is fast enough.

hence these are not getting cached because somewhat fewer requests for them. Additionally, SATA drive might just also be hurting fast retrieval of smaller images.

so you think disk i/o may be the cause.
you can do more tests to confirm this : put all the static files in the page in /dev/shm, and add rewrite rule to fetch these files directly from /dev/shm. so this will eliminate disk i/o slowness issue.

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Actually I managed to shave off another .2 to .3 seconds by serving JS files through Google.

But the thing is, these are the times of US based test server. In case of India, due to latency and slower internet speeds, these delays become bigger. And while I can't really reduce the hoops in the connection or move the server to India due to insanely expensive bandwidth, I am trying to speed up things as much as I can on the serve side.

Will try and see if I can implement that /dev/shm trick, if not, I will bother you again with that. For now I am checking with my host on swapping out the SATA drive for an Intel SSD, maybe that would do the trick.

[eva2000]

disable facebook connect

serve all static files via cdn which is supported for vbseo ie. maxcdn

[Yogesh Sarkar]

Thanks George for the suggestions, but Facebook connect is actively use on our forum for both registration and sharing of posts.

And believe it or not, when I did the same test on vbseo forum to check the effectiveness of maxcdn, it actually showed similar results! Right now I am contemplating running lighttpd or varnish for static files, either on the same server or on our backup server in Europe. Of course if I can speed up things without making them more complicated, then that is always better for a lazy person like me .

So waiting first for WT's response on SSD, that 240GB 520 is now available for a mouth watering price.