Dear Diary Performance
Just a quick update on system performance issues on the server.
We have spent a chunk of time today ironing out some performance issues on the server. Steve has already spoken about the ShowMyHits resolution so I won’t go in to that one.
We have removed the AccessWatch reports that would give you a five-minute report on how many hits the site has had. It’s not really worth having given that it spams the processor to kingdom come once every five minutes. We still have the daily report that is on http://www.deardiary.org/reports, in fact we’ve upgraded both the reporting software and the formatting software so we anticipate far less load and only one report to generate instead of the three we were generating.
Steve found some leaks in the authentication code, we suspected they might be there but when he had a look today with the intent of finding them they apparently stuck out like a sore thumb so the fact that some of our processes were just getting bigger and bigger over time (which will definitely not help performance) is now fixed (or atleast, nowhere near as bad). Either way, we now shut down and restart both the web server and the database server every night when the system is hardly used ensuring that the system is at top notch performance at the beginning of every day. We shall continue to find and remove all the other leaks as an ongoing process.
We will shortly be upgrading the database server to the latest version as well, this also reportedly offers speed improvements.
We are continuing to monitor the performance of the system and the various websites that we are running on it. Given that Openfiction is responding significantly faster than Dear Diary is we are even more reinforced in our aim to ultimately get Dear Diary moved over to the PHP system.
Matt.