Tag: benchmark

LVM snapshot performance

The Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) supports creating snapshots of logical volumes (LV) using the device mapper. Device mapper implements snapshots using a copy on write system, so whenever you write to either the source LV or the new snapshot LV, a copy is made first.

So a write to a normal LV is just a write, but a write to a snapshotted LV (or an LV snapshot) involves reading the original data, writing it elsewhere and then writing some metadata about it all.

This quite obviously impacts performance, and due to device mapper having a very basic implementation, it is particularly bad. My tests show synchronous sequential writes to a snapshotted LV are around 90% slower than writes to a normal LV.

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18/6/2010 6 Comments

High performance WordPress

Of all the WordPress installations I manage, two of them bring in a rather large number of hits.

To speed up WordPress I usually just enable the MySQL query cache and install the eaccelerator PHP opcode cacher. On one particular box, an Intel 1.3Ghgz PIII this increased performance from around 3 requests per second to around 10.

Recently I came across the WP-Cache plugin for WordPress. This takes the finished output from any given wordpress request and caches it to disk, serving directly from the static cache for the next hour (configurable). Any new posts or comments in the mean time immediately mark the cached version stale, so you don’t need to wait around for an hour.

On the same hardware and blog, this increases performance from 10 requests per second to over 250. A 2500% increase in speed.
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5/6/2006 Add Comment