Site Performance Issues/Suggestions

[Nick]

Some of you might have noticed Randomland being a little slow lately. It seems that apache is using more then its fair share of memory and not giving it back when its done. I turned off an option (EnableMMAP) that mentioned something about memory and performance and it seems to have slowed the grab for resources. (Though after reading about that option I have no idea why it would make a difference. Let me know if you can make better sense of it all.) 

Don't be shy about telling people its slow. There is NO reason for it to be slow. Its got a full gig of ram all to itself and hardly any traffic. One thing I have noticed is that viewing the drupal galleries makes the memory usage jump (more before turning off EnableMMAP then now) but looking at pages and the forum seems to have little to no effect on memory usage. The forum seems especially good about not eating the resources.

And plah.

[Nick]

I have reduced the lifetime of apache processes, limited the number of requests each one will do before dieing, and added a PHP accelerator that came recommended from a few sources (APC is its name. Installed using the PHP pear thing.)

Looking at http://onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/02/05/lamp_tuning.html will give you all the information that I have about apache optimization.

Another thing I have read is that drupal likes to have a sizable memory footprint. And that too many modules or bloated modules can make this allot worse. I think the ImageStream.rss file is causing some of the issue. But I am not sure on that. Plus that should only eat up memory the first time its run (making the thumbnails for all the images if they are not yet created.)