Advice to speed up nuke site on IIS

New Member Joined: Feb 10, 2006 Posts: 23

Hello, i run the site called "Canada Kicks Ass" [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]
it is a fairly large site, usualy around 200 people on at any time, gets 6000 - 11,000 uique visitors a day.

But the site at many times seems rather slow, I think it could be much faster than it is, I had done a fair amount to try and improve speed, but I am looking for some advice on what more I could do. The main nuke site is not bad, the forums are the part that bug me with there slowness.

Here is my server setup, it my own rackserver, thats primary use is for this site, I do have around 30 other sites on it, but they are all pretty low visitor sites and low resource usage compared to Canadaka.net

About the Server

Dual Intel 2.4Ghz Xeon 533FSB
4 X 512MB DDR ECC (total 2GB)
Supermicro motherboard X5DLR-8G2+ and 1U rackcase
2 X 73GB U-320 SCSI 15,000 RPM Top of the line hard drives
Windows 2003 Web Server
IIS6 (gzip enabled)
PHP 5.0.3
MySQL 4.1.18-nt

The server is at a Peer1 Networks datacenter in Vancouver, BC Canada

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About the site
phpnuke 7.6
patched (which should have all the mainfile tweaks)
nukesentinel
bbtonuke 2.0.19
Cache_Lite (caching of most the blocks)
eaccelerator php caching (modified from the old nuke 'mmcache tweaks
http://www.karakas-online.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=17536
most sections I only cache for guests, no caching for logged in users. forums are not cached at all. If i try to cache the forums the login system gets messed up and people get logged in as other users, A REAL NIGHTMARE!

Almost all the images on the site are fairly optimizes, down to the minium about of colours needed before they look like total s**t.

Now as far as the forums go, I do have a lot of mods, I know they will add some slowdown, but my members and I really likethe mods. Plus given the specs of my server I feel the speed should be better.

So things I am looking for adive with:

Tweaks to phpnuke or phpbb code to optimize page, database queries
Settings for MySQL (right now they are all default install settings)
IIS Settings/tweaks) I do have a seperate applicaiton pool for this site.
tweaks to the php.ini
Other general speed improving advice.

I made a temp site account if you dont want to register, many of the forum features are disabled to guests, so the page loads faster, especialy for google bots.
Username: reviewer
password: cka

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

The first thing I would do is scrap IIS and get Apache running, ASAP! You're running the latest versions of PHP and MySQL and using the wrong web server technology.

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 4:12 am

... that was not the type of feedback I was looking for.
We could get into large debates of IIS vs apache or windows vs linux, its all been done. And there is lots of data that supports that IIS is just as fast and stable than apache, if not more so.

Switching to apache is not an option, I like IIS6, its not the problem. I used to run freebsd/apache years ago, but switched to IIS6, was faster and a better platform in my opionion.

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 4:23 am

When you post an issue on performance, then my response was more than appropriate. Apache is proven more stable, more scalable, and a better performer. What you did years ago has no bearing on today's technology. I gave you an educated/experienced opinion. You are welcome to take it or leave it, but it wasn't posed as a debate. So let's not turn it into one.

Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6432

From a Nuke perspective, it sounds like you are doing everything you can to optimize performance. Having a lot of RSS blocks can slow down a site, since its performance is determine by that of the source. Could it be that the slow performance occurs when the RSS block cache expires and is dynamically reloaded?

Also, djmaze has posted numerous ideas for improving performance based on his extensive testing and experience. It sounds like you may have already employed these though.

BTW, "Cool Yankee" is usually spelled with two e's, rather than ie. Wink

Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 1:54 pm

Yah i really tried to cut down on loading any images or rss things externaly.

The only thing on the front-page is a sports news RSS from a partner sports site and sports scores from CBS Sportsline. Both are cached for at least 15min.
The CBS Sports Scores are even in its own iframe so shouldn't slow down the loding of page?

But those are only on the front-page. The rest of the site has no rss feeds, but there is external ads from an ad-network. I have a feature for members who donate that they get gold membership. This gold membership displays the site with no ads. I really don't notice much of a speed difference between loading the site with or without ads.

The main site does seem to be faster than the forums, less db queires i guess and many other parts of the site are cached with eaccelerator. I am wondering if anyone every caches full forum pages... since they are always updating might not be so good for end users.

Quote:

Apache is proven more stable, more scalable, and a better performer.

But the same can be said for IIS, depends who you talk to and your sources. Your right todays technology is different, IIS6 has caught up and surpased i many ways.

I am also thinking... my server is a Dual Xeon But i have done no special settings for "dual" processors. I don't know if there is anything that can be done, or if windows takes car of it all. Maybe there is some IIS, MySQL or php settings that can be set to better take advantage of dual cpu's?