[ic] interchange was fast now slow

Javier Martin interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Thu Feb 21 06:10:01 2002


> When I initially installed interchange I was blown away at the speed of
> my new dedicated server.

[...]

> Now
> even a catalog that is unchanged (foundation demo) is really slow....

This might or might not be your case but it will surely help someone else:
Do you use SSL to connect to your pages?

When I switched my catalog to SSL (using apache + mod_ssl) I noticed an
unreasonable drop in performance. I ascribed it to the SSL overhead but
there was more. If you look at a default 'httpd.conf' (the one that comes
with stock Red Hats 6.x and 7.x) you see that KeepAlive is disabled for
*ALL* MSIE browsers in the SSL virtual host section. That must be because
some kind of animosity to MSIE browsers or something, but the fact is that
current versions of IE (>5.0) do perfectly with SSL and KeepAlive.

KeepAlive keeps http connections open for multiple requests. While it
increases performance in all scenarios, it does even more with SSL because
of the extra round-trip that takes the session establishment. The best gain
is in pages with a lot of images and in connections with high latencies. In
my case I reduced page load times to less than a half, and lowered
connections from 30-40 to only 4.

Look at:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=apache-modssl&m=99548101916923&w=2

And follow the thread to the end.


Javier