One of the reasons I’ve done so many upgrades/updates recently is to improve the performance of the server/website(s). Now that I’ve got those out of the way I’ve had some time to do a bit of research to find some easy ways to speed things up. Remember that I’m UnixTarded, so anything I do must be on the easy side.
Based an my reading, one of the best ways to improve the performance of not only Drupal, but any PHP script (Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, etc) is to install a PHP accelerator/cache such as APC or eAccelerator. There are many (manyyy) other things that can be done – but adding a PHP accelerator/cache seemed to be one of those one-time, relatively easy things that can reportedly increase (CMS) website performance by 2x – 10x.
After a little more reading it seems that APC (my first choice to try) is not compatible with the Zend extensions that I’m using, so I decided to install eAccelerator. Installing eAccelrator via WHM/cPanel is easy, and I had it up and running in minutes, with zero issues.
After clearing my browser cache and reloading the site I noticed an immediate performance improvement, especially when doing things like creating new nodes (pages) or posting comments. I also noticed an improvement on my WordPress install while loading pages and posting comments. Things that usually took 3-5 seconds were now happening in ~1 second and things that were previously taking 1 second were happening “instantly”. I don’t have any before & after benchmarks, but I do have before & after CPU and memory usage:
- “Top” CPU usage now averages below 1% – down from 3%-5%
- RAM usage now averages 25% – down from ~50%
- Total daily CPU usage (i dont know how it’s calculated) is now ~20% for GrownUpGeek.com – before installing eAccelerator it never dropped below 60%. It’s also lower for my other site hosted on my server.
If you run a PHP script/CMS on a VPS or dedicated server, adding a PHP op-code cache/accelerator is a great, easy way to noticeably increase the performance of your site.
Randy,
this is interesting. I’ve been trying to reduce the CPU usage on my server but still afraid of installing this kind of app as I don’t want this to screw up the whole server.
I wonder if there is any compatibility or other issues that may rise after using this accelerator.
Thanks
Acakadut – Free Blog! said:
LORD KNOWS i’m no expert, but I could not find anything about other incompatibilities. But that’s going to depend on what else is on your server..
I was afraid of breaking my server also, but if you’re using cPanel/WHM this type of thing is really easy! Just do a lot of reading/googling about what you want to do, set aside a few hours, and have your host’s emergency phone-number handy just in case..
@Acakadut: first thing first, back-up your whole things before install this kind of script
if something going wrong you can restore your backup (cmiiw)
Thanks for the recomendation, I had a VPS suspended for excesive CPU usage recently and I have since installed eAccelerator on it after reading this blog post and the CPU usage has decreased significantly and the VPS has not been suspended since.
Thanks for your reply, Randy. Will try this someday when the hits to my server increased. As of right now, I’m still working hard to get those hits to my server