[ic] More Results *VERY* Slow

[interchange-users@icdevgroup.org (John Young)]

Bryan Gmyrek asked:
> I am running Interchange 4.8.5 on it's own RedHat Linux 7.3 server with a
> pentium III, etc...  Mysql for the products, etc; sessions and tmp files
> are in the /tmp directory under the catalog dir.  In general it is pretty
> fast, typical search times are only a couple of seconds to return
> thousands of results (the catalog has over 3,000 items).
> 
> However, the 'more results' at the bottom of a search is *extremely*
> slow... more than 40 seconds even on a fast internet connection (where
> performing the search and displaying 40 results with images only took 5
> seconds!).  Is there something, anything, that I can do to speed this up??

In addition to looking at your logs (both for interchange and httpd), as Aaron
mentioned), you can look at file I/O performance to/from /tmp.  By default,
Interchange handles more-list data by storing the entire initial search results in
a file under /tmp.  The file will be in a subdirectory named according to the
first letter of your session id.  The file name will be your session id + . + the
MM= value you see in your more-list links.  Something like (session id = xJayxmUu):

/tmp/x/xJayxmUu.45683d15f649e6aa2de84ebd5e1a9392

If you have a broad search with millions of products, the file can be large.  You
may wish to verify how quickly you can read files of that size from /tmp.  If
/tmp is on a busy drive, if the controller is IDE instead of SCSI, if your search results
are multiple gigabytes, you could have slow more-list performance.  For
very high traffic sites, it can make sense to have /tmp on a separate disk or
some other similar strategy.  Aaron's suggestion of checking your logs is
the first step, though.

Good luck.
-John Young