[ic] General Performance and scaling info sought

[Mike Heins]

Quoting Mathieu Lagarde (mathieu.lagarde@nstepcom.com):
> At 08:47 01-06-05 -0400, you wrote:
> >Can anyone point me to any info on the scalability of interchange.
> >I am interested in seeing performance info. ie: "I have interchange on
> >sun blahh blahh and I take xxxxx hits per day, etc..."
> >I am interested in this as I am trying to convince a customer to ditch
> >an expensive system that just doesnt work, but need some general (not
> >yet found) performance info.
> >Any pointers to "large" store web sites in use would be a plus too.
> >Thanks!
> 
> We Install it on one of our cobalt to make our test.  Never use a cobalt 
> and Interchange for a live store it's so slow the customer a the time to 
> fall a sleep before he will be able to buy something.

This is typical of a machine with not enough memory. If it is real slow,
sounds like 32MB. 64MB might also be slow if other things were taking
a lot of memory. 128M will usually give decent response assuming that
there is no other huge memory-using program on the system.

> We plan to install on one of the new  ibm netserver we just order last week.

The latest version of Interchange, 4.7.x, in pre-forking mode, was able to
handle a florist shop on Mother's day with a parsed-page hit rate peaking
at about 500 per minute (this doesn't count images or other hits, which
rate was peaking at about 6000 per minute). This was on a single 700Mhz
Intel box with 1GB of memory.

The new pre-forking mode gives near-mod_perl performance, and can handle
very large sites. Obviously some attention must be paid to performance, i.e.
using [timed-build ...] to obviate repetitive category-building queries,
as we still cannot repeal the laws of physics.

In any case, I am now confident in saying that Interchange can handle
as large a site as most people can envision. That takes into account that
you can place a catalog on multiple machines, of course.

-- 
Red Hat, Inc., 3005 Nichols Rd., Hamilton, OH  45013
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mheins@redhat.com>

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. -- Francis Bacon