[ic] Most Common Performance Issues

[Barry Treahy, Jr.]

Michael Stearne wrote:

> Our site is running IC on a DP 800Mhz Redhat box with 512MB of RAM 
> with SCSI disk.  This machine runs only IC.  The site is based off of 
> the foundation sample site and contains about 300 product using the 
> standard (non-RDBMS) database.  We have seen decreasing performance 
> over the last 6 months the site has been up.  There is up to 4 IC 
> processes running at a time because of traffic.  Each page on the site 
> takes from 2-10 secs to generate.  This is across all platforms and 
> browsers at LAN speed. If an IC process has the machine to itself 
> (only 1 user on the site), that process will take 97% of the CPU.  
> While this is understandable, even when there is 1 process, it still 
> takes ~4 seconds to generate a page.  I don't know how a machine as 
> powerful can get floored by 4 concurrent users.
>
> Currently we run expireall each day.  This seems to help a little.
>
> What else could I do (configuration, cron, etc) to work on performance? 

Hi Michael,

I had many of the defaults, the random and cross components for example, 
which would drag down our development system.  Simply put, those two 
functions really caused IC to generate a heavy CPU loaded.  I can't say 
how much I should blame it on the fact that the DB's are in DBM rather 
than SQL, but I would have expected to see more of an I/O restriction 
with a poorer database format, not a CPU drain.

Since I too am coming up to speed, perhaps some of the Perl and IC 
wizards could shed some light on that?

Barry

-- 

Barry Treahy, Jr  *  Midwest Microwave  *  Vice President & CIO 

E-mail: Treahy@mmaz.com * Phone: 480/314-1320 * FAX: 480/661-7028