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My web app is slow...

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    #1

    My web app is slow...

    I am somewhat disappointed with the speed of our web site. It functions OK, but it is certainly slower now than it was when it was written to use Cold Fusion. I am trying to figure out the best ways to improve performance, and would appreciate any input.

    First off, here are a couple of links that demonstrate what I mean. This page uses a fairly simple grid component: http://www.charityministries.org/messages.a5w
    This page uses a dialog component: http://www.charityministries.org/ann...ents-lsapp.a5w. Most of the other pages in our site do not use components, but use a little bit of A5 code to include other pages such as the header, footer, and buttonbar, using the a5w_include() function. While the speed isn't terrible, our whole site is slower than it used to be when written in Cold Fusion.

    I am using the WAS version 8 to run this site. It is hosted at EasyCGI.com on a VPS with 512mb of RAM. Would it make much difference to upgrade to their next higher VPS plan which includes 1Gb of RAM?

    I am considering switching to another hosting company which offers dedicated servers, such as 1and1.com or crystaltech.com. Their low-end dedicated server plans cost about the same as EasyCGI's high-end VPS plans. Does a dedicated server have an advantage over a VPS if they both use the same amount of RAM?

    Version 9 claims to be faster than version 8. If I would upgrade to version 9, using my current web app and VPS plan, how much difference would it make?

    I realize some of these questions may be difficult to answer, but I'd appreciate any thoughts.

    Nathan

    P.S. This site runs much quicker when testing it on my local machine (Pentium D 2.8Ghz with 1Gb of RAM).
    Tags: None
    #2
    Re: My web app is slow...

    Yesiree, that's slow, and not the norm. Something else is up, and it doesn't appear to be A5.

    What kind of performance do you get from your current site if you have just a simple html page - even one that only says "Hello World" on it?
    -Steve
    sigpic

    Comment

      #3
      Re: My web app is slow...

      Something's wrong. Also check the server's performance; look at CPU usage by Alpha or other programs. I bet something (Alpha or other) is keeping the CPU running near 100%. 512 is not a lot of memory, but it still should perform better than this. Turn off any virus checking. With a VPS (as opposed to a dedicated server) you are affected by when they perform backups, virus checking and other utilities, as well as what any other user on your shared server might be doing at the same time.
      Steve Wood
      See my profile on IADN

      Comment

        #4
        Re: My web app is slow...

        Here it is: http://www.charityministries.org/test.a5w. The speed seems to vary quite a bit. When I refresh my browser, sometimes it's pretty quick, and sometimes it takes several seconds.

        Nathan

        Comment

          #5
          Re: My web app is slow...

          Definitely something not right there...

          ping www.charityministries.org

          Pinging charityministries.org [209.34.169.253] with 32 bytes of data:

          Request timed out.
          Request timed out.
          Request timed out.
          Request timed out.

          Ping statistics for 209.34.169.253:
          Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

          Comment

            #6
            Re: My web app is slow...

            Originally posted by Steve Wood View Post
            Something's wrong. Also check the server's performance; look at CPU usage by Alpha or other programs. I bet something (Alpha or other) is keeping the CPU running near 100%. 512 is not a lot of memory, but it still should perform better than this. Turn off any virus checking. With a VPS (as opposed to a dedicated server) you are affected by when they perform backups, virus checking and other utilities, as well as what any other user on your shared server might be doing at the same time.
            Steve,

            I watched the CPU usage for a couple of minutes. It averaged about 15%, and I never saw it go above 40%. I did have Eset NOD32 Antivirus running, so I turned that off. It may have reduced the CPU usage a little, but not much. Web app performance has not improved, that I can tell.

            Nathan

            Comment

              #7
              Re: My web app is slow...

              Nathan - Your plain htm page was fine.

              One approach I'd take is to progressively build and publish a page.

              Start with just a plain, simple grid - nothing else on the .A5W page. Publish it, see how fast.

              Add another piece to your page - maybe the page header. Publish, view, judge it, keep going until you discover what's slowing things down.
              -Steve
              sigpic

              Comment

                #8
                Re: My web app is slow...

                Originally posted by NoeticCC View Post
                Definitely something not right there...
                Andrea,

                If I remember correctly, I configured the server to not respond to ping requests for security reasons. Does that create a problem?

                Nathan

                Comment

                  #9
                  Re: My web app is slow...

                  Nathan, here is a link to a page on speed. The post has a link to another page, which should give you more ideas.

                  The Alpha Five Version 9 server is faster than Version 8, particularly on large pages as it uses compression to reduce the file size from the server. The server itself is somewhat faster. In some cases, the speed difference is very noticeable. It is almost twice as fast as the older A5V7 server.

                  Comment

                    #10
                    Re: My web app is slow...

                    Originally posted by Nathan Zeiset View Post
                    Andrea,

                    If I remember correctly, I configured the server to not respond to ping requests for security reasons. Does that create a problem?

                    Nathan
                    Ah... no, shouldn't cause a problem... just thought it indicated a speed problem but obviously it's not that!


                    Do you have security enabled on WAS? If yes, have you added .txt to the permitted file types?

                    Is it set to log errors? If yes, how big is your error log file? One of "the Steves" posted a very good post a while ago about things that can cause performance issues on WAS V8, and one of those was search bots/spiders trying to index your site and looking for a robots.txt file. This seemed to cause the error log to grow massively with error messages to do with it not finding the robots.txt file & security permissions etc...

                    Comment

                      #11
                      Re: My web app is slow...

                      Originally posted by Steve Workings View Post
                      Nathan - Your plain htm page was fine.

                      One approach I'd take is to progressively build and publish a page.

                      Start with just a plain, simple grid - nothing else on the .A5W page. Publish it, see how fast.

                      Add another piece to your page - maybe the page header. Publish, view, judge it, keep going until you discover what's slowing things down.
                      Steve,

                      OK, here is a link to a stripped-down version of the grid: http://www.charityministries.org/speed-test3.a5w. And here is a rebuilt dialog page, with less controls: http://www.charityministries.org/speed-test4.a5w. It still seems too slow to me.

                      Nathan

                      Comment

                        #12
                        Re: My web app is slow...

                        Originally posted by Nathan Zeiset View Post
                        Steve,

                        OK, here is a link to a stripped-down version of the grid: http://www.charityministries.org/speed-test3.a5w. And here is a rebuilt dialog page, with less controls: http://www.charityministries.org/speed-test4.a5w. It still seems too slow to me.

                        Nathan
                        That is definitely not right... even for a 512 Mb machine...

                        Have you tried this?

                        Do you have security enabled on WAS? If yes, have you added .txt to the permitted file types?

                        Is it set to log errors? If yes, how big is your error log file? One of "the Steves" posted a very good post a while ago about things that can cause performance issues on WAS V8, and one of those was search bots/spiders trying to index your site and looking for a robots.txt file. This seemed to cause the error log to grow massively with error messages to do with it not finding the robots.txt file & security permissions etc...

                        Comment

                          #13
                          Re: My web app is slow...

                          Originally posted by NoeticCC View Post
                          Do you have security enabled on WAS? If yes, have you added .txt to the permitted file types?

                          Is it set to log errors? If yes, how big is your error log file? One of "the Steves" posted a very good post a while ago about things that can cause performance issues on WAS V8, and one of those was search bots/spiders trying to index your site and looking for a robots.txt file. This seemed to cause the error log to grow massively with error messages to do with it not finding the robots.txt file & security permissions etc...
                          No, I do not have security enabled on the WAS, but I do have it set to log errors. The error log file is 66Mb in size. I do not have a robots.txt file. There were 11 errors logged between 3:00 & 4:00 this afternoon, and 29 errors in the previous hour. Of those 40 errors, 12 were related to the missing robots.txt file.

                          Nathan

                          Comment

                            #14
                            Re: My web app is slow...

                            Originally posted by Nathan Zeiset View Post
                            No, I do not have security enabled on the WAS, but I do have it set to log errors. The error log file is 66Mb in size. I do not have a robots.txt file. There were 11 errors logged between 3:00 & 4:00 this afternoon, and 29 errors in the previous hour. Of those 40 errors, 12 were related to the missing robots.txt file.

                            Nathan
                            Hm, without security enabled, you shouldn't get the same problems I used to get with the robots.txt file... could you email me one of your sample pages to [email protected], then I will upload it to our WAS (V9 but we never had those kinds of slow speeds on V8!) to see what the speed is like?

                            Comment

                              #15
                              Re: My web app is slow...

                              If your error log is 66MB each error has to open-write-close that 66MB file. And if you have the raw log turned on, it writes absolutely every transaction, which is a voluminous amount of text. Turn off all logs, restart the server and retest. Periodically rename your logs so the current write-to log is of modest size.
                              Steve Wood
                              See my profile on IADN

                              Comment

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