I have an installation of 1.3.2.4 running two Store Views and 2,734 products. The site sees around 15,000 visits a month.
Apache and MySQL (mostly Apache) hovers at around 1.5 GB RAM usage most of the time and peaks over 3 GB. My questions is, considering the stats, is this normal? Seems like a lot.
If that memory usage is in fact abnormal, would an upgrade to 1.4.1.1 help?
If you consider your stores, then you are doing just fine. But regarding the traffic you're getting, it seems that you need to provide some extra features to Magento to let it fire up. For this, you can have some of the following:-
Install APC (Alternative PHP Cache) or XCache (or any other alternative) and configure the use of it in your Magento back-end. It dramatically increases the speed of Magento.
You can have Magento's cache stored in memory (tmpfs in Linux).
You can also tell Magento to save sessions into Memcache so that your sessions are in memory & distributed.
Check your Magento's Index Management section for any requirement of indexes, every month or bi-monthly. If you do find any indexing required, then do it immediately & clear the cache from your Cache Management.
Check your database every week or bi-monthly for any overhead in any of your database's tables. If you do find any overhead, then "optimize" those tables immediately.
Try reading some of these articles, to know more about these.
Also, upgrading to 1.4.1.1 will help you out in terms of features provided by Magento. But for performance, I think it will be best to wait for some more time, until Magento releases its version 2 in the market, in which some performance issues may be taken care of by Magento.
Hope it helps.
1.3.2.4 is a good stable release, upgrading to 1.4.0.1 is very painless and will give you the added benefit of split index management and much faster administration area (mass attribute update is fixed).
Don't be overly concerned about memory usage, depending on the number of Apache modules you have loaded, you should expect to see about 30MB per child. As long as your not swapping or encroaching your limits, you shouldn't have any real concerns over how much is being consumed. Disabling unused modules will help cut down memory - but to be honest, not by any noticeable margin.
You could always throw Nginx in front as a reverse proxy to serve static content requests and pipe PHP/dynamic reqs. back to Apache. That way you can keep the modular Apache build with .htaccess support and cut down your memory overheads significantly.
However, this could do with more information, such as the output from
free -m
To see how some of the memory is being allocated.
I'd probably suggest downloading tuning-primer.sh to run on your MySQL config. It will give a good (entry-level) indication of how efficient your memory allocation is.
Those stats look quite typical for Magento, if you consider a single hit/page load can use upwards of 64MB RAM.
Your Apache settings can also drastically effect the amount of RAM your system uses. Upgrading your Magento installation may give some small performance boost, but don't expect it to do much for memory consumption etc.
If your memory consumption is a real issue for you then you have several possible routes to reduce resource usage, such as:
Install Nginx as a reverse caching proxy to apache (apache is a hog and is poor serving static content).
Use Nginx + PHP Fast CGI and remove apache
Try using worker MPM module for apache, or Fast CGI.
Install caching proxy such as Varnish/Squid.
If you are stuck with apache you can tweek KeepAlive and other settings to allow you to reduce memory usage
Tweek MySQL settings, such as query caching to imporove resource usage / performance
I have found 1. to work very well in reducing cpu/memory usage as it will allow Nginx to serve static images etc without requiring apache to hog RAM trying to serve them.
Related
I am on a VPS server (Quad core with 768MB of RAM. I am running Apache and using APC as my default caching engine) . I get around 2000 visitors per day with a maximum of 100 concurrent visitors.
According to CakePHP DebugKit, my most memory intensive pages use around 16MB and the other pages average at around 10MB.
Is this memory usage normal?
Is it normal for my memory to bottleneck at 2000 visitors per page?
Should I consider upgrading my plan to 2GB RAM?
I also noticed that the View rendering is taking up most of the memory, around 70% on most pages.
I am monitoring my resource usage, when I have around 50 or more concurrent users, I am getting 0 free MB left.
Thank you
You should also check your other processes. From my experience, MySQL takes up more memory than anything else on any stack that I run. You should also implement better page caching so that PHP doesn't need to be touched when it isn't absolutely necessary. But Apache is also a memory hog that needs to be fine tuned. If you want to stick with Apache, then run Varnish in front of it.
Also, keep APC, but also add Memcached. It's much faster.
If your site has a spike-load that brings it to zero memory, then, if you can, consider launching extra instances of the server and doing a sort of round-robin (if the VPS is cloud-hosted and this is possible). If the load is constant, then definitely upgrade.
#burzum is completely right, however, that you should just switch to nginx. It's far, far better than Apache at this point. But, just to put you on the right track, quite a few people run nginx as a reverse proxy in front of Apache, and while that does speed up the server, it's entirely unnecessary because nginx can do pretty much anything you need it to do without Apache. Don't bother using Varnish in front of nginx either because nginx can act as its own reverse proxy.
Your best bet is to implement nginx with apcu (upgrade php to 5.5 if possible for better performance) and use memcached, and implement nginx's native microcaching abilities. If your site is heavy on read and light on write, then you might notice that everything is taken care of by nginx just retrieving a cached copy from memcache. While this helps with memory, it also helps with processing. My servers' CPUs usually have a 3-5% usage during peaks.
Is this memory usage normal?
Yes, it doesn't seem to be high for a normal CakePHP application.
Is it normal for my memory to bottleneck at 2000 visitors per page?
I guess yes, I'm not a "server guy".
Should I consider upgrading my plan to 2GB RAM?
I would try switching to Nginx first. Apache is a memory eating monster compared to Nginx, just search for a few banchmarks, a random one I've picked by a quick search is from this page.
Overall Nginx should provide you a much better performance. At some stage I would consider updating the memory but try Nginx first.
i have some problem with my VPS.
We are using a VPS to run our CMS and our websites, for now we have 300MB memory limit, and now we are close to reach the limit.
To maintain low cost(i know, increase memory is not to much expensive), but if i find a solution to optimize what we have, will be better.
What can i do?
Thanks!
I would suggest to increase memory - more memory, faster website :-)
But if speed is not important, reduce all cache sizes, set php memory_limit to 8M, disable opcode caching (APC, eAccelerator)
or try Raspberry Pi as server, now comes with 512MB :-)
I have a small 256MB vps which uses
apache + php + mariadb (mysqld)
I found memory was being gobbled by apache at every request 20MB at time for a simple wordpress page. It would settle but over time gobble into swap space and slow everything to a crawl. I suspect there are ways to fine tune mpm_event and mpm_worker to stop entering swap but I didn't figure out how.
When working in such tight environments it is important to know what is using what memory and reduce everything, so that swapping is minimized.
A summary of what I did follows, I managed to get 100MB physical headroom for tweaking, this is not a heavily loaded server but needs to be accessible (and cheap):
Using slackware (the os and default services seem to use less memory than debian, perhaps there is less loaded by default on my providers image)
Switch mysqld innodb tables off and use myisam
configure mysqld to reduce cache sizes if relevant
install cms fresh so they are definitely using myisam or alter all the tables
in apache choose to use the mod_mpm_prefork rather than mpm_event and mpm_worker ("apachectl -V" will tell you which is being used)
set sensible values for maxserver(start from low values for number of servers and requests and work up)
test the server under load whilst doing 'watch free' or 'top' through ssh
you should be able to see memory & the processes being created and destroyed as the load increases
adjust your httpd server settings and retest until happy
I like to see the memory max out at no more than 90% and reduce back down when the load is gone before I am convinced it will stay up without grinding to a halt (start using swap).
check your php.ini memory settings as stated in another answer.
I have also set a cron job to send me an email when swap starts to get used significantly, so I can restart something or even restart the whole server if I can't find what has used the memory, this should happen less and less the more you fine tune.
As stated this is not an environment that will perform well under heavy load but the cost may be more important to you.
Just my two pence worth...
I would look at Nginx like concerto49 recommended, if you have just one website on it also consider Litespeed (www.litespeedtech.com) they have a free version which may be sufficient to power your site.
If its PHP based, then strip out everything you're not using. Use APC/XCache to processing every request. Nginx also has a caching module, that could help so you can avoid hitting PHP for every request if its still fresh.
What type of VPS is it? OpenVZ? Xen? KVM? If it is OpenVZ does it have VSwap or Burst memory?
What type of CMS / Website are you running? Is it PHP based? Are you using Apache? If so have you tried nginx? I would look at optimizing the web server component and removing unused processes/applications to reduce memory and increase performance.
I need to speed up my magento installation, so I'm planning to put the content of 'var/' (or only var/cache and var/sessions) on a tmpfs.
I'm also buying a reserved instance on Amazon, so I would like to keep a sufficent amount of RAM. I want to enable memcached, PHP Apc, MySQL caching and HTTP caching.
I'm thinking of a Medium Reserved Instance with the following specs:
3.75 GB memory
2 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 2 EC2 Compute Unit)
410 GB instance storage
32-bit or 64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
EBS-Optimized Available: No
API name: m1.medium
Will the RAM be enough to appy a good caching system?
Looking now (after 3 months) the var directory is 14gb, but I think cleaning it up each 5/7 days would be good too.
Do you have any suggestion for me?
P.S. the store will contain an average of 100/150 products.
I think moving /var to a tmpfs is probably not your biggest bottleneck and would likely be more trouble than its worth. Make sure Magento caching is enabled and you have APC enabled.
This post covers some general tips on increasing Magento performance:
Why is Magento so slow?
I would suggest looking into setting up a reverse proxy like Varnish.
Getting Varnish To Work on Magento
If you do plan on just using a tmpfs in memory I would suggest looking into Colin's improved over Zend_Cache_Backend_File
https://github.com/colinmollenhour/Cm_Cache_Backend_File
Also I would suggest looking into mytop to keep tabs of if you have any places you can optimize queries in the application itself or in my.cnf to help ease any DB bottlenecks.
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/
Session Digital has a good white paper (although somewhat dated) on optimizing Magento enterprise and the same can be applied to Community. Out of everything I've tried, Varnish, as mentioned in the White paper offered the most significant increase in response time.
http://www.sessiondigital.com/resources/tech/060611/Mag-Perf-WP-final.pdf
Hope this helps!
Firstly, +1 to all of the answers here.
if you're thinking about running /var/ out of tmpfs it's probably because you've heard of the lousy file IO on AWS or you have experienced issues with it yourself. However, the /var/ directory is the least of your concern - Zend / Magento's autoloaders are more taxing to IO. To mitigate that you want to run APC and the compilation (assuming you're not using persistent shopping cart).
As echoed by other commenters, anything that runs from cache or memory will circumvent PHP and thus the need to touch the disk and incur IO issues. Varnish is a bit of a brute-force approach and is a wonderful tool on massive sites that scale to millions of views; but I believe that Varnish's limitations with SSL and the lack of real documentation and support from our Magento community make it a better intellectual choice than an actual alternative.
When running Magento Community I prefer to run Tinybrick's Lightspeed on AWS on a Medium instance - which gives me the most bang-for-buck and is itself a full-page-cache. I get 200+ concurrent pages/second in this setup and I'm not running memcached or using compilation.
http://www.tinybrick.com/improve-magentos-slow-performance.html/
Be careful with running memcached in your AWS instance as well - I find that it can be impeded by a power-hungry Apache gone wild in the rare instance you haven't got a primed cache which causes Apache maxclients issues while it waits for cache response. If you could afford it I would rather run two micro Apache instances with a shared memcached session store and a load balancer in front of them - give some horsepower to the db on a separate box for them to share, though. But all setups are unique and your traffic/usage will dictate what you need.
I have run Magento in the AWS cloud for 3 years with great success - and I wish the same to you. Cheers.
The framework I am using is called SocialEngine.net v4, and it's completely written in Zend, so it's insanely super CPU intensive. SocialEngine is in PHP and uses MySQL.
I need to know what OS, what hardware you suggest (dual xeons, amd, how much ram, etc...) and how to optimize it properly to handle large amounts of traffic.
I only have 11k users right now, and it's running incredibly slow, I'm talking 7 second page load times.
The framework however does have memcached, and apc options for caching installed, but even with APC or Memcache on, it doesn't make a big enough difference...
I need to know what the best way to attack this is as far as optimizing mysql, inoodb tweaks, apache tweaks, any performance tweaks, what type of hardware, and amount of ram.
I have a very big marketing plan in place, and will probably start increasing traffic by 1,000+ signups per day... So traffic will start to rise very progressively. When I initially marketed, I did 50k uniques in 6 hours, 20k signups, and 500k pageviews... (server crashed, lost half my users... and haven't marketed since, because I been trying to rebuild)
You could start with xdebug to profile your application and find the bottleneck
Honestly? And this is just my opinion, instead of spending a small fortune on a single server - buy many small servers and load balance them. Mac Mini's are wonderful for this and are capable of running their standard OS X or Linux if you choose. You will get way more performance out of 10 small $500 machines than you will out of 1 $5000 machine.
You don't provide us with any information about your set up.
How many servers do you have? What services are they running?
When you say APC and Memcached is on, have you actually set them up to actually work?
How many connections does your Apache allow for?
What is your MySQL configuration like? Is the memory settings optimised? Most importantly are all your tables indexed properly? Have you checked your slow query log? Did you run EXPLAIN for your queries?
ZF wise, are you caching your table metadata? Are you caching tables that don't change so that you save network traffic? Have you checked the official ZF optimisation guide?
Also... Why did you assume that ZF is killing your CPU usage?
Does anybody have experience working with PHP accelerators such as MMCache or Zend Accelerator? I'd like to know if using either of these makes PHP comparable to faster web-technologies. Also, are there trade offs for using these?
Note that Zend Optimizer and MMCache (or similar applications) are totally different things. While Zend Optimizer tries to optimize the program opcode MMCache will cache the scripts in memory and reuse the precompiled code.
I did some benchmarks some time ago and you can find the results in my blog (in German though). The basic results:
Zend Optimizer alone didn't help at all. Actually my scripts were slower than without optimizer.
When it comes to caches:
* fastest: eAccelerator
* XCache
* APC
And: You DO want to install a opcode cache!
For example:
alt text http://blogs.interdose.com/dominik/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/opcode_wordpress.png
This is the duration it took to call the wordpress homepage 10.000 times.
Edit: BTW, eAccelerator contains an optimizer itself.
MMCache has been deprecated. I recommend either http://pecl.php.net/package/APC or http://xcache.lighttpd.net/, both of which also give you variable storage (like Memcache).
Both are interesting and will provide speed boost since they compile source code into binary representation which is then executed by the PHP engine.
Any huge web site running with PHP (Facebook for example) is running some sort of opcode cache system like MMCache.
The problem is that they are not very easy to set up depending on your system.
Depending on how much of your PHP code is actually executed and how long that execution takes they can be a really big win. It certainly isn't going to hurt, but the gain you see will very much depend on where your time is currently spent.
btw mmcache has been rolled into a different project now, I forget the name but Google will tell you.
I use APC on my production servers and it works pretty well out of the box. Compile it and add it to PHP and there isn't much tweaking left to do for it. I check it every once in a while just to review stats but since I use MVC a lot all of the main files (routers, controllers, etc) rarely change on a day-to-day basis so that code stays compiled and runs pretty efficiently.
currently we use apc, free and was just a simple plug and play on our live servers. Provided a huge performance increase for our site, especially as the project size increased. I also have the apc.stat disabled so it doesn't check if the code has been updated, so whenever we need to update the code on the live site we restart apache.
I use APC, and can attest that it can dramatically reduce the CPU and I/O load on an app server if you maintain a high cache-hit rate. It not only saves you from having to compile, it can save you from having to read the php files from disk at all. (i.e. the bytecodes are served directly from main memory, so it's super fast) It lowers the speed to render a single page, and increases the requests per second your server can handle.
If you use RedHat or CentOS, installing APC is super simple:
yum install php-devel httpd-devel php-pear
pecl install apc
echo "extension=apc.so" > /etc/php.d/apc.ini
# if you're using SELinux:
chcon "system_u:object_r:textrel_shlib_t" /usr/lib/php/modules/apc.so
/etc/init.d/httpd restart
You asked about downsides. The only downside is that it requires some memory. The default on APC is 30MB, but it can be adjusted, and the cost of a little bit of memory more than pays for itself with the increased speed and response rate.
BlaM's testing included all the DB calls made by WordPress. When you're making fewer DB calls, you'll see the performance gain of opcode caches be even more dramatic.
I used Zend Accelerator a little back in the day (2004-ish). It certainly gave some significant performance wins on code it could work with, but unfortunately the system I was using was designed to quite often dynamically load code and then eval it, which Zend Accelerator couldn't do much with at the time (and I'd guess still can't).
On the down side, we certainly saw some caching issues (where the code would be changes, but the compiled version sync with the change for one reason or another). I imagine those problems have likely been ironed out by now.
Anyway, I don't have any hard comparison numbers, and certainly didn't write the same system in different environments for comparison, but for the vast majority of systems, PHP isn't going to kill you performance wise.
Have you checked out Phalanger? It compiles PHP to .NET code. Here are some benchmarks which show that it can dramatically improve performance.