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 🙂