performance issues...

[Robert Locke <rlocke@infiniteinfo.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from Robert Locke <rlocke@infiniteinfo.com>     ******


Hello all,

I wrote earlier complaining about MV 3.12 slowness on a P166 with 128
MB RAM running Linux RH4 (I've included the email below).  I've since
installed MV 3.12 on an SGI Challenge/S server running Irix 6.2 with
256 Megs of RAM.

The server is hosted behind a dedicate T1 in the States, but since I'm
in the Philippines and my connectivity in the Philippines is slow, I
asked some friends in the States with fast connections to help test
the site.  All said that it was too slow.

One said it was zippy for a short while, but started to slow down
significantly when she tried simultaneous operations (ordering
different items) across 3 browsers and was getting 20+ second response
times.  But the static pages in other sites we host on the same
machine continued to zip along fine.

I didn't do anything fancy when I installed Minivend, and it is using
GDBM.  I'm running the 'simple' catalog unaltered.  I've expired the
session database (though the site isn't getting much activity).  The
site is currently running at:
	http://205.217.47.210/simple/

Am I doing something wrong?  Is there anything I missed?  Should I be
running Minivend using statically generated pages (I tried, but it
didn't quite work correctly - but that's for another day.)

I'm getting very jealous hearing about all these Minivend success
stories - it's like a great party that I wasn't invited to!  :-)

Thanks for any insights...

Rob




> I am currently evaluating MV 3.12 on a P166 running Linux (2.0.30).
> The machine has 128M of RAM (verified by /proc/meminfo), but I am
> encountering performance issues surfing the simple catalog:
> 
> First off, it takes about 2-4 seconds or more before pages begin to
> display (say when placing an order).  In an admittedly primitive
> experiment, we had 3 people order the same item at the same time and
> it took about 10-12 seconds before the shopping cart appeared on
> anyone's browser.  Do these numbers seem reasonable given the system
> configuration?  Are there any benchmark numbers to refer to?
> 
> XOSView shows that no swapping is occuring and memory utilization
> maxes out at about 45%.
> 
> On the same system, I ran a silly little shopping cart program I wrote
> a long time ago and it worked almost instantaneously.  I know I'm
> comparing apples and oranges - MV is 1000x cooler feature-wise.
> 
> So, am I doing something wrong?  Is the machine just too weak?  Our
> production machine will be considerably beefier, but I'm worried about
> scalability given these initial numbers.
> 
> I understand that some people are running MV with up to a million
> items in their catalogs.  Are these sites also receiving heavy
> traffic?  Are there any performance issues?  I assume these are
> monster machines!
> 
> Anyways, I would love to use Minivend as our solution, so I would
> appreciate any insights.
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