Question

Well, to be specific, I’m running my own content management system running on Linux Apache2 MySQL PHP server. The system is comparable to Linux kernel w/ modules.

–(request start)–

The system launches his “init” script that takes care of dependency-based module loading (only minimum modules are loaded, in proper order, so it “just works”, but nothing else (disabled/unused modules are not loaded)).

Once the system is ready, request processing comes in – all the data gets loaded, parsed, processed, buffered, chewed and so on, until we have a complete (x)HTML page.

–(request end)–

Once the request is processed, the data are passed to browser and the system is killed. All this happens in a very short time, but the most cpu-intensive is the beginning part (preparating system for use).

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I have a few options:

1. Let system be in a way it’s now (and risk performance issues after it’s deployed for REAL usage (approx. 100-500 requests/s per system))
2. Do some kind of preloading (preparing the system manually and not let anything magic happen then)
3. Find a way to keep the system in ready-for-use state (all modules loaded, classes initialized, ready MySQL link, etc.)

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Question is:

• Is there a way to accomplish point 3? (point 2 is what I want the least)
• If it’s possible, how?

Thanks for any advices that’ll point me right way!

Answer 1

Probably what you need is PHP APC, eAccelerator or some other extension that parses your code and keeps it as byte-code in the memory, which for CPU hungry situations can help your performance a LOT. It seems that you have the knowledge to setup such extension, I would recommend you the “APC” being the most used and tested one out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators

Edit: For MySQL I would go with using “persistent connection” which might help as well.