I'm in trouble: 20 sec to load with dedicated 16gb Ram Linux server

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hi,

I’m Carla and I’m in big trouble!
I have a new Xeon server with 16gb RAM runing Ubuntu, Apache 2.3, Mysql & every optimizer I could find: Eaccelerator and Memcached. Half of the ram goes to Mysql.

I’m running a Joomla site with cache on. The site is tresjolie.com.ar

My report shows 16 sects to load, TTFB: 11.178s!!!

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120307_JB_3G73E/

I’ve tweaked Apaches and Mysql config but I think something is very wrong with the first by a 12 sec.

Any recomendations of where to look to solve the problem? I’m pretty lost I’ve already looked everywhere I could.

Best regards,
Carla

2

Install New Relic NOW! Seriously.

Sounds like you are on a dedicated server and have the necessary skill set to understand the data it will give you. It should be able to point you to the specific problems that are causing the long byte times.

It looks like static files are being served fast enough so it’s unlikely that you have an Apache configuration problem.

It looks like all of your php requests are pretty painful though (even the ones for content other than the base page - 2 seconds each) so there may be a configuration problem between Apache and PHP. Are you running PHP as mod_php, cgi or fcgi? You might also need to do some tuning on eaccelerator if you are blowing out it’s cache.

If you have any modules that are making external calls that could also cause the huge first byte problem. New Relic should be able to point them out really quickly if there are any.

3

Hi Patrick,
Thanks very much for your advice, I didn’t know about new relic, I’m installing it right now.

It started to collect the data.

I’m runing PHP as FCGI but I also load mod_php in the apache modules. I had troubles with Virtualmin and Modphp.

I’m going to look at the data that New Relic throws and post it here!

Thanks very much for your help.
Carla

4

Patrick, I hadn’t really looked at New Relic before either. I installed it a couple hours ago and it’s pretty impressive. It does a lot of things but I like how you can see the most time consuming database activities. It’s like a profiler for your live server.

5

Yep, it saved my butt on WebPagetest when I was expecting some huge traffic surges (100x increase to over 1M page views on the day of the Google Page Speed Service announcement last summer).

Eliminated some key bottlenecks and kept the service from falling over :slight_smile: Been a huge fan since.

6

Hi!

Thanks for the tips, I eliminate the 10 sec FTTB turning off the cache (memcache), it must be conflicting or something because as soon as I turned it off, the page loads in 3secs!!

And I spent 5 days trying to discover why the 20 secs of loading time…

best rergards

7

Could have been a config issue where the app couldn’t talk to memcache properly so every request to the cache had to time out (and it probably made several requests during the course of a load).