[Cialug] decreasing website latency

[Matthew Steven]

On 11/04/2010 09:35 AM, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> What kinds of latency do you think is realistic from a good server 
> doing SSL? Maybe 350ms is the norm?
>
Benching a simple dynamically generated XML feed on one of my sites over 
SSL on a live server, I'm getting the following using a brief benchmark 
of 'ab -n 100 -c 5'

Time per request:       170.048 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       34.010 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

There's no caching or anything involved, other than opcode.  It's a 
pretty new and ballsy machine though, so it may not be a fair comparison 
from that aspect.

I was surprised to find that using nginx for all the static content made 
a huge difference in the memory footprint overall, since this way one 
can reduce the number of apache threads a great deal and use apache only 
for serving php.

Look at it this way: why would you want a fully loaded down apache 
thread with its big php modules and a dozen other things you may or may 
not be using serving up an image, when you can have a microscopic nginx 
service serving it with very little resource usage. In any given page 
these days, 80% of the requests are going to be for external resources 
like images and text anyhow.

Oh, and you'll want to have munin or some other decent monitor installed 
to actually be able to tell if what you're doing helps or harms once it 
is out there.

-- 
Matthew Steven
http://www.geniusweb.com/
(515) 999 0842