Posted on

Performance question – update.

Stephen Hoffman reacted on my post on performance and agreed the site is slow. He included data on what is actually requested (if that tool exists on non-Apple systems, it’s worth a look) and that shows that loading the images  on the main page takes considerable time – especially where data is to be retrieved over the Internet and the contacted site does not respond. So I checked whether the sites are still worth to be presented and if not, I disabled the load of the image.

The main bulk still is PHP code, and it cannot easily be accellarated. I know of software that actually stores compiled code and uses it when accessed, but it isn’t available on OpenVMS – yet. Second, it may need to be incorprated into the PHP engine, making it even harder to use.

Allowing greated working sets for the PHP engine may help. It means the webserver’s quota need to be re-examined.

One other thing – not really performance related but as annoying as a slow-loading site: It may happen you get the message:

ERROR 502 –  External agent did not respond (or not acceptably).

This is a known issue, caused by a bug in the C Runtime library, that I have signalled to HP, and awaits the right solution: PATH cannot be extended beyond the size when initally set by the C ‘getenv’ function.

WASD uses getenv to get the current value of the PATH variable, and sets it to a new value with setenv. But if that new value exceeds the length of PATH, setenv fails because of this bug.

Just reload the page in these cases. This time, PATH is not set on getenv and setenv will succeed with the new value.

I know of a workaround I can build into WASD (Just redo the setenv if it fails), but I still have to make that update….

Posted on

Performance question

I got a comment from a visitor from the Far East, that the site is very slow, and he wondered if is was on his side, or mine.

There is no indication of “slow”, so I would like ‘slow’ to be quantisized, and in comparison to what?  It could well be a matter of perception and expectation.

No, this site isn’t lightning fast. PHP is memory hungy, being an interpreted language, and creating a process and setting up the environment takes time. And this box holds just 512 Mb ofmemory where I should have 1Gb – at least, as it the recommendation. A linux box with Apache, with this amount of memory and the same load, wouldn’t be either.

Besides that: it’s not the only PHP job that runs. And to prevent starvation (causing the whole system to hang) access is limited to a small number of concurrent accesses from one site, and when many accesses occur, the excess may be slowed down or queued – or, if things get really nasty, it may happen that connections are dropped with a 503 Server Busy error.

I do have to take precautions to prevent the site being overwhenelmed with too many abusive accesses. If you may be slowed down, it might be others causing the delay.

Apart the load of PHP, there’s more that runs on this machine: the spam filter, and, of course, the database. Add the occasional abusive access (FTP, SMTP), it doesn’t help performance either…

So it is not “fast”. And it won’t be either. If you really want to read the content, you’ll have to exercise a little patience. I hope it’s worthwhile.

(If anyone can help me out with 2Gb memory for a DS10 (EV67, 667 Mhz) for a fair price (don’t forget I’m just a hoobyist :)) I would be quite happy)

By the way: There IS a solution bit it will take quite some time to have it installed: Mark Daniel has created a VMS-native CMS program that keeps all in one big file. But I want to store my daat in a database. Less fast, less efficient, but I don’t have to extract all data and store it in  that single textfile…And spare time is rare…

Rest assured: it could be worse. Several months ago I helped Michelle Popejoy on her WordPress site – her hosting provider runs an emulated DS10 with 1 Gb of memory, and has SWS (Apache) installed and the site was slow – even slower than mine. So I installed both SWS and WASD on a spare PWS500 with 256 Mb memory – similar to the one I ran this site on before, but with just one single, internal disk. SWS works – but it took ages for the WordPress homepage to appear, and the system pages massively during the processing

I also installed WASD on that machine and after some problems with configuration (and chnages in the code of the PHP engine and WASD) I could run her site, which reacted much faster (and with far less paging than SWS).

Shameless plug for WASD? Yes – but not without reason 🙂

Posted on

18-Jul-2013

Internet Lights Out
Two days ago, when trying to acces webmail at 16:00, the connection that was fine 15 minutes earlier, was gone completely. None of the sites was accessable, even the router could not be accessed, something that is normally no problem. Seconds later I got a message on my cellphone that TV was gone as well. Tried to phone: gone as well.
Because the TV worked, except it didn’t get a signal, en the phone looked fine, it was obvious it wasn’t a power outage. So either the router broke down, or something was wrong with the external (Fiber) connection.
When at home, two hours later, I checked the router by checking the wifi-signal, but that looked Ok. I could connect both phone and laptop op Wifi, and access any machine on the local network. But any attempt to get out onto the Internet, failed.
So it was definitively a matter of the external conenction. So I looked at the box that connects the router to the fibre. And indeed, one of the LEDs that should blink, was off. For my ISP that was proof that the lights of the Internet were turned off….
Service disruption, indeed. So a ticket to handle the repair was created, and I would be informed – over SMS – of any change.
But yesterday at 16:00, no message had arrived, so I decided to call the ISP on the progress: since ALL services were off, I would expect them to hurry…But no, I was to be handled today; they couldn’t locate the problem remotely so the problem might be in the PointOfPresence. Worst case, if not, an appointment would have to be made to have a look from my side. No idea how long THAT would take.
Given the reuptation of the big company behind the ISP, it could take days, if not weeks….

Luckily, the disruption was solved when I tried to access the webmail site at 16:00 this afternoon.

But not any status update over SMS…..

Well, it all works again. But if you promise your customer to inform him on the progress of the work on the ticket, it would be nice if that promise was kept. EVen if it turns out the disruption is caused by a mistake – or even something stupid.

Posted on

01-Jul-2013

Maintenance – as usual.
No problems. Nor a lot of spam last month:
PMAS statistics for June                                                                                                            
Total messages    :   2776 = 100.0 o/o                                                                                              
DNS Blacklisted   :    492 =  17.7 o/o (Files: 30)                                                                                  
Relay attempts    :    222 =   7.9 o/o (Files: 29)                                                                                  
Accepted by PMAS  :   2062 =  74.2 o/o (Files: 30)                                                                                  
  Handled by explicit rule                                                                                                          
         Rejected :   1322 =  64.1 o/o (processed),  47.6 o/o (all)                                                                 
         Accepted :    386 =  18.7 o/o (processed),  13.9 o/o (all)                                                                 
  Handled by content                                                                                                                
        Discarded :     98 =   4.7 o/o (processed),   3.5 o/o (all)                                                                 
     Quarantained :    216 =  10.4 o/o (processed),   7.7 o/o (all)                                                                 
        Delivered :     40 =   1.9 o/o (processed),   1.4 o/o (all)
This had been noticed already: most days the OPERATOR.LOG file is relatively small, just a few 10th of Kb, where 200 – at least – used to be appear regularly. It’s just the last days that the amount of rejected messages increased again.