Sunny days ahead! 18ms page loads

Posted by Sigurd on 1 October 2007

We're really fortunate to have acquired two brand new Sun X2200 M2 AMD64 servers, at a major discount thanks to them supporting us as an open source development initiative!

We're waiting for a bit more of the gear to arrive (extra processor, to bring it up to four cores, and more RAM) before we commission the server. But curiosity got the better of me, so I came in on the weekend to set up the machine with SilverStripe for benchmarking.

The AMD Opteron dualcore 1.86ghz  (with 2GB ram) loads the homepage of the default SilverStripe 2.1rc3 in about 37ms, or capable of over 50 pages a second given the two cores. This is with SilverStripe's partial caching system, that still produces several database calls. This illustrates how we've been been able to favour development of new features rather than caching and speed so far, although security, speed and memory overhead will be looked at later in the year.

ab -n 100 -c 2 http://ernie.silverstripe.com/apache2-default/silverstripe-v2.1.0-rc3/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev <$Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking ernie.silverstripe.com (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache/2.2.3
Server Hostname:        ernie.silverstripe.com
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /apache2-default/silverstripe-v2.1.0-rc3/
Document Length:        2338 bytes

Concurrency Level:      2
Time taken for tests:   1.896831 seconds
Complete requests:      100
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      294600 bytes
HTML transferred:       233800 bytes
Requests per second:    52.72 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       37.937 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       18.968 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          151.30 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.0      0       0
Processing:    33   37   3.9     36      53
Waiting:       30   37   4.2     36      53
Total:         33   37   3.9     36      53

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     36
  66%     38
  75%     39
  80%     40
  90%     43
  95%     46
  98%     49
  99%     53
 100%     53 (longest request)

Once we get the extra RAM and CPU, and I tune it the default settings of PHP, Apache, MySQL setup, we'll be humming!

Currently www, demo, doc, and userhelp.silverstripe.com and about 100 other websites all share an ex Weta Workshop server previously used to render Lord of the Rings. With www.silverstripe.com alone accounting for more than 100GB of traffic last month, it will be great to get the SilverStripe sites on their own dedicated machine!

Given Sun sends everything in efficient to deploy packages, it won't be too long until all this is up and running. (I was certainly impressed with the hard-disks already being mailed in their hotswap containers; heck, as pictured, they even put power cords in their own air-cushioned boxes)