Tov Are Jacobsen
Hosting with eApps
Journal
2010-08-08 Gravitation twoards slower response times.
At least meassuring via Site24x7 the performance has gravitated twoard a slower response. Amazon updates their numbers slower and still lists at 0.306 seconds, so it will be interesting to to see in the next couple of months if this is purely a meassurement error. Site24x7 say they have a 1 Gbps connection.
2010-07.24 Image optimization
There are several alternatives available, I decided on OptiPNG because i can just do optipng *.png (default settings) on my gfx folder and it ensures that none of the images are underoptimized. With some tools you need to store in a temporary file and then copy over. The improvement of using the highest optimization level was marginal, but with a large increase in processing time. IMHO optimization I can do automaticly on a regular basis is a lot better than implementing a cumbersome process only to see it being neglected over time. Install it with:
yum install optipng
I installed it as a job every day, this might be very excessive, but it's very fast runniing though every png on my homepage, here's my cron entry:
0 22 * * * find /opt/tomcat6/webapps/tovare.com/ROOT/gfx -iname *.png -exec optipng {} \;2010-07.24 Fixed and better than ever
With some prompt investigation from Eapps it was narrowed down to internet-related. My primary site monitoring is done by Site24x7 (My two other providers only provide ping) while Eapps has their servers at QTS Atlanta Metro Datacenter. I also gave Site24x7 an heads up. I don't know who did what but the routing degredation between the two locations was fixed.
Performance on my homepage was never bad, alexa which meassures actual visitors rates my homepage as very fast with a download time of 0.306 seconds. 98% of sites are slower: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tovare.com
2010-07-21 Tuning and additional tests.
A test originating from Florida/USA indicated that the Site24x7 times was poor, in particular the dns-lookup i removed some graphics from the footer as a result.
A multibroser test from the same site indicated that the fastest loading times for users is someone in Chicago running Firefox, the front page was completely loaded in 375 milliseconds.
The Google Chrome Audit shows that I'm underutilizing cache-controls. The latency is way way to high testing from Norway.
2010-07-21
Performance woes. Both responsetimes and throughput has taken a hit for the worse. Below i'm monitoring my Apache fron-end and after that I'm meassuring Tomcat. The first hit was after upgrade, the second on the 17. july is unknow and dramatical, it would seem like the connection between apache and tomcat is dysfunctional somehow because apache doesn't give it's normal performance boost.
The graph for tomcat shows a decresed responserate after upgrade, and more volatile performance after the 17. july.
Attempt 1: Restarting apache using apachectl restart
I also ran a small local benchmark loading the confluence login screen 1000 times and my frontpage 1000 times.
Results:
http://tovare.com/confluence 19 pages / second
http://tovare.com/ 45 pages / second.
Performance is a bit worse than the first day of operations with MeshCMS. The average is over 391 ms, with a low of 198 ms. Something strange is happening, and I don't really know why.
17:26:52 up 62 days, 3:28, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.13, 0.08
2008-08-25
Responsetime is running at 130 ms. Not the fastest site around, but acceptable.
2008-08-25 PART 2
Swithing had a dramatic effect, the average response time dropped from 883 ms to 199 ms. There's still some sluggisj behaviour though. A test with Gomez instant test reveled that the Validated tag was really slow, but I was also very curous about the extended times spent in DNS lookup. I'll have to look into that.
2008-08-25
Decided to run the site on Tomcat by default. I don't see the huge benefit of joomla. As of today the current average response time is 883 ms running apache/joomla/mysql. Let's see how this improves in the comming days.
2008-08-24
I had a strange incident today, my site suddenly stopped respondin and when i logged in i discovered that my entire /opt directory was gone. I reappeared shortly again but I had to restart tomcat before everything went back to normal
Note-to-self:
- Write a cron-script which does a route check of service quality and availability, then attempt an automated restart when things doesn't work OK.
- In this incident apache was ok, so it might be possible to redirect the request to a standby-tomcat?
2008-08-18
The eternal search for a text-editor.
2008-08-18
I decided to take another look at MeshCMS, the benefit is speed and a light architecture making it more likely that I'll modify it when I need to. I spend a few hours during the weekend to make templates. Although I'm not kompletely done yet, it was fairly simple since the system relies on taglibs.
2008-08-02
Joomla is stable and is by most metrics the most popular open source CMS around, but I had a look around for alternative platforms anyway.
I focused my attention on Java-based open source CMS software because they can be made to be much much faster than php or python based software, while retaining flexibility. Backend UI was a key evaluation metric, because inititally writing a servlet to pump out some content isn't really that hard.
Magnolia CMS looked very promising, requiring a bit more work to get going. The huge showstopper was that the DB is easily corrupted causing the entire instance to be completely beyond rescue. There's some trule excellent stuff in that architecture, so I hope they eventually solve some of their roboustness issues and ran nicely on my eApps account.
MeshCMS, a very nice little CMS with basic features. It can be considered an alternative to offline CMS's such as CityDesk CMS. The author says he doesn't really focus on it anymore due to other priorities, but what's there is pretty solid code.
OpenCMS, wow! this contains a lot of features. I didn't even start to get into it because the UI is one of my key evaluation criterias. It installed nicely on my eApps account.
Apache Lenya, lots of nice infrastructure here. Not exactly what I was looking for.
Liferay, wow, my eApps account was underpowered for this one. Truly performed like a dog and hardly ran at all.
In progress:
jLibrary,.. under evaluation. The client looks a bit like Eclipse, which is welcome.appears to be good for metadata and files.
2008-07-20
Yesterday i discovered an issue with joomla, which prevented png images with transparency and depth of 16 to be rendered in pdf. I tried to install ImageMagick but it stopped in a scheduled status. After a while I sendt a support request, wich solved the issue.The support request was issued at 09:57 PM, acknowledged and assigned at 10:40, fixed at 11:50. I'm perfectly happy with this level of support.
The response times on my pages improved. I think enabling cacheing in joomla has had something to do with it, because the administrator interface is mindbogglingly slow at times, I'm not sure if going with joomla was a good idea at all, but I'll stick with it anyway. Average responstime on the front page is now 523 ms, which is a bit slow. Most of this is joomla, I have apache jakarta running on port 8080 and the response time is 194 ms.
2008-07-18
Average responsetime for today is currently 786 ms. I'm really not sure why, because the CPU is at 1%, but everything is running on a virtual machine which might be a factor. All in all I'm still very excited about the offering, and at $20/month which for all practical purposes is allmost like a dedicated server. It appears that the eApps access is slow.
2008-07-17
I started a test with Site24x7.com every 5 minutes to check the availability of my site. And for the past 27 hours the site has been up 100%, however the responsetime is a bit slow. The maximum time has been 4 seconds, and the average is running at 662 ms. My homepage is currently running joomla and jakarta, but the average load is only 1%. I had hoped things to be slightly faster. (The page which is downloaded for each test is currently 12,35 Kb)
2008-07-15
Initial contact with eApps was awesome. Their web-pages are informative and provided allmost all information I wanted, but I did decide to give their callcenter a ring before making a final decision to buy. I got a call back shortly after purchasing with a followup-call to see if I needed more help. I've worked putting together call center operations before, and this is exactly the experience I'm aiming for when designing customer care operations. A lot of companies dread the additional cost of providing a follow-up call, but it's well worth it as it protects the reputation of the company and increases the odd of a longer business relationship. In addition, if things should go wrong when getting started it being pro-active increases tolerance.
