New web server, WP optimization
Tonight, more or less on a whim, I moved my blog from my older (dual 1GHz Pentium III Coppermine, 1GB RAM, 10k RPM SCSI disks, Compaq Proliant DL360 G1, OpenSuSE 10.2 32-bit) web server to my newer one (dual 1.4GHz Pentium III, 2GB RAM, 10k RPM SCSI disks, HP Proliant DL360 G2, CentOS 5.3 32-bit). I did some profiling with ab (ApacheBench), and just moving from one server to the other got some serious performance gains (I was profiling with runs of 1000 requests total, 10 concurrent requests). I also added the W3 Total Cache Wordpress plugin, which got the numbers to look even better!
As a side note, this was all done pretty quickly (moving the database and tarball for the vhost, installing the plugin, changing DNS), so please give me a heads-up if you experience any problems.
The numbers are rather impressive:
| Total Time(s) | RPS | Avg. Connection Time (ms) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old Server | 1192.252 | 838.75 | 11,893 |
| New Server | 569.121 | 1757.09 | 5,667 |
| Default W3tc Config | 23.754 | 42,098.44 | 237 |
| Tuned W3tc | 12.281 | 81,428.76 | 122 |
All tests were performed on my workstation, a Dell Precision 470, two dual-core Xeons at 2.8 GHz, 2GB RAM, 16GB swap, OpenSuSE 11.1 64-bit. This was on the same LAN and subnet as the servers, with the workstation connected via a 1Gbps copper Ethernet link and the web-serving interfaces of the servers connected via 100Mbps (There’s a trunk in between, from the gigabit aggregation switch to the 100Mbps distribution switch).
