php performance problems, where to start?
 

Hi,

Recently I;ve replaced E107 with Mambo. Both are CMS applications written in PHP with a mysql backend.

Mambo performs somewhat better than e107 but it's still quite slow compared to the speed I get serving static html.

I think I can rule out mysql problems since squirrelmail is also very slow and that does not use mysql.

System is a modified redhat 7.3 running apache 1.3.27.something with php 4.2.2.
Hardware is a Pentium Pro 200 with 128mb ram.

System status 12:52pm up 38 days, 11:40, 0 users, load average: 0.15, 0.35, 0.27

Memory Usage 95% memory used, 6944 K free
(shared: 0, buffers: 5536, cached: 49784).
Swap Usage 7% used, 132712 K free.

Anyone any ideas where to start to improve performance?

Getting more memory or shutting down some memory-hungry stuff might be a good idea. It might be so that PHP has to use the swap instead of RAM and in that case you'll see a big slowdown.

unfortunately that box is already filled to the max with memory. I'll have a good look at running services, see what I can do without. In the mean time I've found
http://php.weblogs.com/tuning_apache_unix

and

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/lpt/a/272

I think I'll also look at that hdparm document, see if I can make any improvements there before I attempt to install a php cache thingy.