WIKI server on old computer: how to speed up things?

[nirax]

Hi all,

i recently placed the family wiki-server on an old Compaq Armada Notebook (P133,96MB Ram,2gb hd).
Reasons to use it as server are the low power consumption profile, the "built in UPS" and the mobility.

Now we all would expect it, performance of apache2, php4 and mysql is not really astonishing.
Wait time for 1 page display is around 4-5sec.

I saw that several apache and mysql threads are started.
What settings could be used to speed up the server a little? Not more than 2 ppl would access it at the same time.

greetings,
nirax

[morodoch]

Have you considered using a different setup?

Maybe using a file-based wiki rather than a mysql one, and a lighter weight webserver?

There are several alternatives to apache under gentoo:

http://www.gentoo-portage.com/www-servers?view=list (maybe lighttpd?)

And several alternative wikis, too:

http://www.gentoo-portage.com/www-apps?view=list

I've used both moinmoni and twiki, and IIRC neither required mysql.

[nirax]

Thanks for the answer.

I will definately try a ligher http server.
The other parts (PHP4 and mysql) are necessary though. We have already a lot of wiki entries so we need to use "mediawiki".

Can these applications be quikcer/use less ressources?

greetings,
nirax

[morodoch]

Well you can certainly trim the amount of memory that mysql uses; plus tweak some performance-related stuff:

http://mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/opti ... gured.html

I guess this would be a good place to start. You may also want to play with different table types to see what works best for you (innodb, isam, ...).

Try running top and see what's going on when you're loading your pages. Is it mysql that's doing stuff? Or the http server? Is it swapping? Or just generally slow disc I/O? If you can answer these questions, you may be able to make a more sensible guess at what to do to speed it up.

[Valermos]

I had a similar problem with mediawiki software executing really slowly on some old hardware. Turns out the problem for me was that multiple php files were being unnecessarily re-parsed over and over each time a page was loaded. So, I installed Turck MMCache which caches each php file after it's been compiled and greatly reduces server processing load. The difference was dramatically noticable for my mediawiki server. Here's a link to the software if you're interested in giving it a shot. http://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net/index_old.html

[nirax]

cool stuff!
Turck MMCache could solve it here also. load average went from 5-6sec to 1 sec.

greetings to you both,
nirax

edit:
and down to 0,4 sec adding also ZendOptimizer to the game ! )

ok now the old hardware does not feel slow at all anymore. astonishing!