Ways to speed up Collectiveaccess Installation

atzemaej

Hi Everybody,

Overall, I am quite happy with my organization's collectiveaccess server. However, I still feel our installation is much slower than it should be. Whereas our wordpress installation takes about 2-3 seconds for each page, providence takes up to 8 seconds and pawtucket 10-11 seconds. The former is not a big deal as it is a backend, but I would like pawtucket to be snappier. From the developer tools on my browser, it appears that at least half of the time it takes to pull up a page is spent on contacting the site (and presumably the database) and the rest is for download jss and the rest. I set up caching with sqlite, but that does not seem to make a lot of difference. I am a little bit at a loss as to how to assess the performance of our site more in depth and I cannot tell if the problem is with our plan/host (dreamhost in our case) or with collectiveaccess. FYI, the relevant addresses are theoldtownmuseum.org for the main (wordpress) site and theoldtownmuseum.org/Catalog for pawtucket. We are running the dev/php8 branch on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS with php 8.1 on a VPS with a separate mysql server running mysql 8 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. As I said, we are using slqite caching as dreamhost does not offer redis or memcache for the tier for which we are paying. We do have only 2 GB RAM on our VPS, which is about 60% used with no evidence of virtual swapping (free -m has all zeroes for swap). I suppose we can switch to 4GB, but that would almost double our monthly internet expense and I am not sure that it would make a difference since we seem to have plenty of RAM.

Any insight and/or would be appreciated,

Thanks,

Eisso

monica

If you have a VPS, then you should be able to install redis on it, but you will need more than 2gb of ram if you do that, as redis stores the cache in ram for quick access. Another possibility is a laggy network between the app server and the database server.

The best performance I've noticed is in 4vcpu, 8gb ram with everything on the one VPS (app, db and redis). For small setups you could get away with 2vcpu and 4gb ram.

seth

If Wordpress is taking 2-3 seconds to respond then I'd guess you're on a pretty slow VPS.

Don't use SQLite for caching. It's one of the slowest options. If you can't use redis then just use file caching and set up a script to clear the files once a night.

The main performance issue beyond caching is going to be database access. If the database is slow then the entire system will be slow, since almost everything involves database access. If MySQL is running on another machine then try to find out if that machine is over-committed. If MySQL is running on your own machine, then I'd look at the MySQL settings, as the stock ones are not tuned for performance.

atzemaej

Monica & Seth,

Switching back to file caching actually did speed things up quite a bit. The responsiveness of the pawtucket site is now more or less on par with the wordpress main site (2-3 seconds), while the providence backend seems a tad slower (3-4 seconds). Since I have had discussions with both of you about another problem relating to the display of multiple images for an entry, I noticed that (at least for now) whereas before there would always be one image not showing when clicked on its thumbnail representation in the carousel, now all images show. Since I only switched to sqlite caching this summer around the same time that I started noticing this problem, it seems plausible that that switch and my problem with the display of multiple images were somehow related. I just never made the connection. Perhaps something to do with the implementation of sqlite caching versus that of file caching?

One question about removing the files for file caching: Are these cache files all stored in /app/tmp/collectiveaccessCache? Also (so really two questions), what purpose do all the caCompiledView* and caPPTP*.pptx in /app/tmp serve? Given their content, it seems there would be no harm in deleting those overnight as well.

Thanks again,

Eisso

monica

I use redis, so I don't have a collectiveaccessCache directory, but the caCompiledView files can be safely deleted (not sure what the .pptx files are, apart from the extension for MS Office Powerpoint files?)

There is a caUtils command 'clear-caches' that you can use too.