Advice to speed up Canadaka.net

Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2006 11:40 pm

Hello, i run the site called "Canada Kicks Rainbow Brite" www.canadaka.net
it is a fairly large site, usualy around 200 people on at any time, gets 6000 - 11,000 uique visitors a day.

But the site at many times seems rather slow, I think it could be much faster than it is, I had done a fair amount to try and improve speed, but I am looking for some advice on what more I could do. The main nuke site is not bad, the forums are the part that bug me with there slowness.

Here is my server setup, it my own rackserver, thats primary use is for this site, I do have around 30 other sites on it, but they are all pretty low visitor sites and low resource usage compared to Canadaka.net

About the Server

Dual Intel 2.4Ghz Xeon 533FSB
4 X 512MB DDR ECC (total 2GB)
Supermicro motherboard X5DLR-8G2+ and 1U rackcase
2 X 73GB U-320 SCSI 15,000 RPM Top of the line hard drives
Windows 2003 Web Server
IIS6 (gzip enabled)
PHP 5.0.3
MySQL 4.1.18-nt

The server is at a Peer1 Networks datacenter in Vancouver, BC Canada

----------------------------------------------

About the site
phpnuke 7.6
patched (which should have all the mainfile tweaks)
nukesentinel
bbtonuke 2.0.19
Cache_Lite (caching of most the blocks)
eaccelerator php caching (modified from the old nuke 'mmcache tweaks
http://www.karakas-online.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=17536
most sections I only cache for guests, no caching for logged in users. forums are not cached at all. If i try to cache the forums the login system gets messed up and people get logged in as other users, A REAL NIGHTMARE!

Almost all the images on the site are fairly optimizes, down to the minium about of colours needed before they look like total Rainbow Brite.

Now as far as the forums go, I do have a lot of mods, I know they will add some slowdown, but my members and I really likethe mods. Plus given the specs of my server I feel the speed should be better.

So things I am looking for adive with:

Tweaks to phpnuke or phpbb code to optimize page, database queries
Settings for MySQL (right now they are all default install settings)
IIS Settings/tweaks) I do have a seperate applicaiton pool for this site.
tweaks to the php.ini
Other general speed improving advice.

I made a temp site account if you dont want to register, many of the forum features are disabled to guests, so the page loads faster, especialy for google bots.
Username: reviewer
password: cka

Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:55 pm

wow.. these forums are pretty dead, heh

I am looking into ways to reduce the amount of db queries needed to load just a basic page, no module or blocks.

Here is an example, the content of this page is just html, after nukes header and footer. there is no blocks loaded

http://www.canadaka.net/modules.php?name=about&file=headers2

[ Script generation time: 0.1045s (PHP: 64% - SQL: 36%) ] - [ SQL queries: 34 ]

so my base nuke takes around 30 queries, any suggestions on how this could be lowered?

Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 1:56 am

saweet I got a basic pageload down to 9 db queries from 30+

example: http://www.canadaka.net/modules.php?name=about&file=headers2

tweaked some things in the theme.php and a couple other places, but where I lost most the queries was in the counter.php

If you don't need details statistic tracked, like hits per hour, day month, you can comment out a lot from includes/counter.php

I just left 2 DB queries there, for hits and year. I don't care about the rest, thats what server logs are for.

So there is a tip to reduce some db queries, counter.php

Captain Joined: Apr 30, 2004 Posts: 556

There are a couple of other areas to consider.......

Points.... not sure where that is now because I removed it long ago.

Survey block.... If you use the Nuke Survey module and block, those are pure db query hogs.

Seems like some very knowledgeable people have left here in the past 2 months. Not sure what has happened......

Lieutenant Joined: May 11, 2003 Posts: 167

USE THIS:

function is_admin($admin) {
global $prefix, $db;
if(!is_array($admin)) {
$admin = addslashes($admin);
$admin = base64_decode($admin);
$admin = explode(":", $admin);
$aid = "$admin[0]";
$pwd = "$admin[1]";
} else {
$aid = "$admin[0]";
$pwd = "$admin[1]";
}
if ($aid != "" AND $pwd != "") {
$aid = substr("$aid", 0,25);
$result = $db->sql_query("SELECT pwd FROM ".$prefix."_authors WHERE aid='$aid'");
$row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result);
$pass = $row['pwd'];
if($pass == $pwd && $pass != "") {
return 1;
}
}
return 0;
}

function is_user($user) {
global $db, $user_prefix;
if (isset($userSave)){ return $userSave;}
if (!is_array($user)) {
$user = base64_decode($user);
$user = explode(":", $user);
}
$uid = $user[0];
$pwd = $user[2];
$uid = intval($uid);
if ($uid != "" AND $pwd != "") {
$sql = "SELECT user_password FROM ".$user_prefix."_users WHERE user_id='$uid'";
$result = $db->sql_query($sql);
$row = $db->sql_fetchrow($result);
$pass = $row['user_password'];
if ($pass == $pwd && $pass != "") {
static $userSave;
return $userSave = 1;
}
}
static $userSave;
return $userSave = 0;
}

IT SETS THE USER AND SO IT DOESN'T PERFORM THE CHECKS ALL THE TIME ON PASS

Lieutenant Joined: May 11, 2003 Posts: 167

AND IF IT ISN'T ALLREADY THERE... ADD TO MAINFILE:

$phpver = phpversion();
if ($phpver >= '4.0.4pl1') {
ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
}else if ($phpver > '4.0'){
if (strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')){
if (extension_loaded('zlib')){
$do_gzip_compress = TRUE;
ob_start();
ob_implicit_flush(0);
}
}
}

Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 5:27 pm

spottedhog wrote:

There are a couple of other areas to consider.......

Points.... not sure where that is now because I removed it long ago.

Survey block.... If you use the Nuke Survey module and block, those are pure db query hogs.

Seems like some very knowledgeable people have left here in the past 2 months. Not sure what has happened......

I am using the points system, but not seriosuly, because there is a points leak somewhere, arg thats another issue, can't find it. some users get tons of points somehow.

But i dont have points for pageviews, only for posting things so i dont think any db queries lost there?

I don't use the survey block, do you mean even if i dont the core nuke has some queries relating to it?

Quote:

$phpver = phpversion();
if ($phpver >= '4.0.4pl1') {
ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
}else if ($phpver > '4.0'){
if (strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')){
if (extension_loaded('zlib')){
$do_gzip_compress = TRUE;
ob_start();
ob_implicit_flush(0);
}
}
}

do you mean to replace that with what I have currently? which is:

Code:

$phpver = phpversion();
if ($phpver < '4.1.0') {
$_GET = $HTTP_GET_VARS;
$_POST = $HTTP_POST_VARS;
$_SERVER = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS;
}
if ($phpver >= '4.0.4pl1' && strstr($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"],'compatible')) {
if (extension_loaded('zlib')) {
ob_end_clean();
ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
}
} else if ($phpver > '4.0') {
if (strstr($HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], 'gzip')) {
if (extension_loaded('zlib')) {
   $do_gzip_compress = TRUE;
   ob_start(array('ob_gzhandler',5));
   ob_implicit_flush(0);
   header('Content-Encoding: gzip');
}
}
}[quote]

I changed the is_admin and is_user with yours but no change in # of queries.

Something I did do awhile ago that helped, though I would pass on. In my themes I have severl things that only show if_user, so rather than checking with that function multiple times, I check once in theme.php, then set a variable = TRUE, there. that I then use in my theme files. I do the same to check if a user is_paid.

I've been tweaking my block files. many had db queries inside query loops. Have reduced this by using Select joins.
[/quote]

Private Joined: Jun 14, 2005 Posts: 36

Any more ways to get less queries??? I cant believe how slow a site can run with nuke. Even on my 3.2Ghz server with 2gigs of ram it runs like crap. Did you figure anything else out canadaka?

Captain Joined: Apr 30, 2004 Posts: 556

Here are some ways to make Nuke faster.....

--Make code XHTML Strict compliant.
--in Statistics, remove code that collects hourly and daily stats.
--drop the updatepoints from mainfile.php and modules that use it.
--use less graphic intensive themes
--do NOT use google adsense
--modify your robots.txt file to allow only specific search bots
--modify your .htaccess file to deny spam and referer harvesters
--drop the Survey block from loading

If you use Sentinel, it will also use a lot of overhead, checking each IP hit, etc.

This would be a good start.....

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 7:38 pm

Thansk for the comments spottedhob. I had already done msot of what you suggested long ago.

My layout is not XHTML Strict compliant though, I guess I could make it so, but would that really have an affect on speed?

I would love to disable nukeSentinel, i know it usesa lot of overhead. But I am afraid to do so, Sentinel blocks 10-20 ips/attacks? a day on my site.

Hmm doing some testing, removing the include of nukesentinel only saves 9 db queries... i guess thats a fair bit when you add it up. But I you don't notice any decrease in page load times.
http://www.canadaka.net/test.php

Site Admin Joined: Aug 17, 2003 Posts: 12313

I don't know what else you could really do. Perhaps switching to an Apache server?

Speed seems just fine for me, most page generation is under 1 sec.

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2007 11:35 pm

Most of the nuke module pages load fast, and the front-page along with some other key pages are cached (I manualy output the contents to an html file), so they load fast. Its really the /forums where the problem is.

During the day the forum index takes 5-15 seconds to load, and I'm even caching a bunch of the output at the bottom of the forum index (blogs, recent users). Forum Topic pages take 5-10+ seconds to load.

And when the site gets bogged down, it gets ever slower. But if its high traffic i think it becomes more of a server hardware issue. And for those times I am getting a 2nd server to use as a dedicated MySQL box.

*TIP*
For guest users I cache the entire /index.php to a static html file. I added some code to the start of index.php and end of footer.php to catch the output and write it to an html file. Then I load this file if its less than 2min old. It makes a HUGE difference. Id recommend anyone with a heavy front-page to do something simular.

[hr]

index.php (at the top)

Code:

//Canadaka's homepage full page cache
$cookie_username = $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS["phpnukeUser"];
if ($cookie_username == null and $user == null) {
$cachefile_home = 'D:/Hosted Sites/canadaka.net/www/cache/home.html';
$cachetime_home = 1 * 60;
if (file_exists($cachefile_home) && time() - $cachetime_home < filemtime($cachefile_home)) {
   echo "\n";
   include($cachefile_home);
   $cached_home = 1;
   die();
}

if ($cached_home != 1) {
   ob_start();
}
}

footer.php (to very bottom)

Code:

//Canadaka's homepage full page cache
if ($cached_home != 1 and $cookie_username == null) {
$fp = fopen($cachefile_home, 'w');
fwrite($fp, ob_get_contents());
fclose($fp);
ob_end_flush();
}
die();

make sure you remove any die(); in footer.php above this point.

I imagine there might be a better way to do this, but it works for me.