Part 2: Tuning a 1&1 VPS to improve a vBulletin board.
In part 2 of tuning a 1&1 VPS to improve vBulletin I installed an Op-Code Cache utility. Because PHP is an interpreted language using simply mod_php requires the code to be read, interpreted, and compiled on the fly each time a page loads. This doesn’t take very long on modern computers. However the more traffic your site gets obviously the more even milliseconds add up.
I looked at several Op-Code Cache utilities, and after some discussion with another tech decided not to use eAccelerator but rather APC. In part because of the simplicity of installation, and because it’s going to be included as a core part of PHP 6. I would like to thank @floris for this post on installing APC on CentOS
Below are benchmarks run using Apache Bench: ingo # ab -c 100 -t 5000 website.com/forums
APC disabled Performance:
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 53.368813 seconds
Complete requests: 50000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Non-2xx responses: 50000
Total transferred: 28500000 bytes
HTML transferred: 15900000 bytes
Requests per second: 936.88 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 106.738 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.067 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 521.50 [Kbytes/sec] received
APC Enabled Performance:
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 33.140479 seconds
Complete requests: 50000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Non-2xx responses: 50000
Total transferred: 28500000 bytes
HTML transferred: 15900000 bytes
Requests per second: 1508.73 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 66.281 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.663 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 839.82 [Kbytes/sec] received
As you can see our requests per second went up by 61% which is a pretty big deal. Also our mean time per request dropped. All in all for a fairly simple installation this was a worth while improvement.
In Part 3, we’ll discuss some extremely minor MySQL tuning I did which made quite possibly the biggest difference of them all as far as performance.
Thanks to: i_am_sam_lee for the image
