KohaCon10: Web Performance

by ByWater Staff on Oct 28, 2010

Presented by Martyn Smith

Places to think about performance:

User’s Browser:

• Compression
• Minifying CSS/JS
• Far-future expires, unique filenames
• Reduce Requests (use caching)

Try using YSlow (a Firebug extension)

Network:

• Latency. Your server may take a millisecond, but the network may take a second for round trip.

Web Server:

• CGI is very inefficient. Lots of overhead. Look at mod_perl and Plack, since they do all the overhead ahead of time, and stay alive, rather than loading/unloading repeatedly

Data Sources:

• Minimize queries
• Persistent connections
• use faster sources, like caches

Martyn has no experience with Koha before the other day, but did some testing with CGI and FastCGI. Scaling for multiple requests gets 567ms for startup, 25ms for each execution!

Some suggestions:

• Migrate to FastCGI or PSGI/Plack
• where possible, cache dynamic content at the whole-page level
• Isolate static files, provide a mechanism to serve them independently

[tag]kohacon10[/tag]

[Originally posted by Ian Walls]