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Quick Site Update

John P.

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John PozadzidesJust a quick note to let everyone know that the site has been partially migrated to the new server. That is to say that the database is now running on the new big daddy machine, although the Web server is still on the old machine. (If you’re a new subscriber you can select the “Digg” related tag below to see the history.)

For those of you who may have been refraining from Digging articles in order to help me keep the server running – Thanks! And it should no longer be necessary! The new configuration should handle a traffic spike from Digg now (fingers crossed), and it’ll be even better in a day or two when everything gets entirely moved to the new machine.

So, at this point nothing would please me more than to see all the articles getting Dugg again. :-)

John

PS – Thanks for everyone’s patience as the site goes through the growing pains!

Comments

  1. Query caching is easy to setup and only needs some simple steps:

    1.) Check your MySQL version (“SELECT VERSION()”) and stop with a version prior 4.0.1
    2.) Check if this feature is available with the query “SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘have_query_cache'”; The result should be yes.
    3.) Check the size of the cache with “SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘query_cache_size’;” the value has to greater than 0 for enabling caching.
    4.) There are two ways to set the cache size: on for the time the server is running: “SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = {SIZE_IN_BYTES};” and the other is setting the size in the server’s configuration file. Lookup for the my.cnf file, probably in /etc of /etc/mysql and add to the section ‘[mysqld]’ a line like
    query_cache_size={SIZE_IN_BYTES}
    After restarting the mysql server caching should be enabled.
    These hints are for a mysql server running under linux, but will work also with Microsoft Windows as the operating system.

  2. This page generated with 44 queries, in 0.312 seconds.

    Yep, things are rockin’ now. Thanks for that MySQL heads up; I wonder if my host uses it on my site.

  3. As the first action to improve the performance on the new server I activated the query cache of MySQL. With query caching the time consuming execution of SELECT statements could increase up to 200%. This feature is available from MySQL version 4.0.1 on.

  4. Ok. We’re definitely on the new server now! Currently here is what I’m getting:
    This page generated with 87 queries, in 0.489 seconds
    That makes the new server literally almost 20 times faster!

    Bring on the Diggs! :-)

    John

  5. Peter,

    I’m not totally sure what is causing the slowdown, but I am aware of a few things:

    • Yes, all the widgets are causing most of the queries. When I was testing Rapid Access before adding the widgets it was like 12 queries, and exceedingly fast. When we get fully migrated I’ll do some testing to see which ones are the biggest culprits.
    • The funny thing is that if you check Cesar’s site he’s got: This page generated with 112 queries, in 0.509 seconds. So it’s got to be a hardware issue on my end (or a really badly behaving plugin).
    • The Web server is still running on the old machine, although the database is on the new machine. There is a little latency in making the calls to the DB server, but I think the majority of the delay is coming from Apache or PHP on the old server.
    • Roy Kaldung is doing the migration work for me on this move, he did some benchmarking and told me the old server would only handle about 25 connections per second. Currently there are times during the day when we’re pushing up on that, though with the DB removed we should handle more now.

    Although the pages are taking time to generate they are all being cached via WP-Cache so hopefully most people are getting them delivered much quicker. You can tell if you’ve got a cached version by viewing the source code and looking at the very bottom line.

    I believe Roy is going to have everything finished in the next day or two and after we switch the DNS over hopefully you’ll see those page generation times drop dramatically. I would think that going from a single 2 Ghz Celeron processor to dual AMD 64bit processors with 4X the RAM would make a huge difference. :-)

    John

  6. Something is still slowing down this site. When I first came here, your load time was:

    This page generated with 87 queries, in 9.525 seconds.

    To load this comment page it was:

    This page generated with 39 queries, in 4.583 seconds.

    87 queries? Wow…is it all the widgets you run or just WP’s “code is poetry” bloat showing its inefficient colours?