RE: [Phpgroupware-users] PHPGW is Dang Slow

[Chris Weiss]

>And that's the f'ing problem. But not for the PostgreSQL, MS SQL,
>Oracle nor any other "professional" or "enterprise" ;-) RDBMS' out
>there that can handle varchar fields of "infinite" lenght - for
>example my favourite Postgres 7.2 can handle varchars up to 1GB. So
>if there are users who use such databases, they should be able to
>utilize them in full, shouldn't they? Anyway, imho the
>interconnection between "text" fields and the database performance is
>a very, very serious issue. And (imho again) phpGW team should at
>least take it into consideration in future developement of phpGW.

MSSql 7's is 8000, maybe 2000's is more i dunno.  Simply reading a text field
shouldn't be any performanace hit, and certainly no more than a varchar as both 
are
variable.  Feel free to modify schema-proc to detect the max varchar for the 
current
RDBMS and use a large one instead of text and submit a patch.

>And here Chris I strongly disagree whit you. One can run phpGW
>perfectly on a machine with 128 megs of RAM only. One just has to
>know how to do that ;-) Here are some tips:
>
>3. Reduce the number of Apache instances kept in the server memory.
>Default setting in most distros is 10 Apache instances - way too much
>if you have a dedicated phpGW server with up to 50 users. It is rare
>when more than 2 instances are needed.

so you have the per-hit overhead of spawning a new proprocess?  no wonder you 
think
it's slow.  Seriously, add some ram then benchmark with your tweaks (which are 
good
and I already do) and you'll see just how not slow this can be.

>
>So by meeting these guidelines I've managed to set up a Pentium
>150MHz with 64MB (yeah - sixty four) with apache 1.3, php4,
>postgresql (mandrake 9 distro) and APC. And it was a perfecty usable
>phpGW install. The funny thing is that with several users the average
>swap file usage was about 0 (zero). You knwo how they say: 640 kb
>ought to be enough for everyone ;-) Of course it was an experiement,
>but one should know it is doable and fully usable :-)

sure, but how much cache does that leave you?  1 or 2 meg?  this means that 
every
page hit, every database call, every new spawned apache child (and phpgw spawns
15-20meg children due to mysql, php-imap, sessions, and other modules and
extentions) means a slow and expensive disk I/O.


You want to tweak your setup for your specific system, fine.  But phpgw has to 
run
on /everything/ and do /everything/ so that means we have to take some 
comprimises
like using text fields for data storage of unknown length content.