Tag: speed

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

Turck MMCache speediness on Debian Sarge

UPDATE: The info in this post is deprecated. See the new post about eAccelerator instead.

I installed Turck MMCache PHP accelerator and I got a big improvement.

ApacheBench reported 4.52 pages per second before and 12.47 pages after installation (a WordPress 1.5.2 page on a 1.2Ghz PIII). That a 275% increase in performance, with currently no observed problems. I tested this with both Apache2 and lighttpd, and got a similar boost with both.

There is only a package for Debian unstable at the moment, so I downloaded the package source and backported it to Debian sarge. I put the package in my apt repository (along with a backported openswan package I’m using). Add to your sources.list:

deb http://johnleach.co.uk/downloads/debian sarge backports

and apt-get update ; apt-get install turck-mmcache

See PHP fly (comparatively)

UPDATE: I’m running into a few problems now actually. WordPress runs fine, but an application of my own is having some serious problems. MMTurck is kicking out the following log message:

[13072] MMCACHE: PHP crashed on opline 1 of main() at /path/to/webapp/cligs-app.php:24

I’ve disabled the extension for now until I investigate further.

UPDATE: S

12/1/2006 1 Comment