[Moin-user] need server-busting test

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 10:09 PM, Rick Vanderveer
<rick.vanderveer at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm with Marcin on this one.  I have a wiki-farm of a few thousand pages
> that's used for internal documentation at my company.  My server is running
> on an old Windows XP box, using Apache2, FastCGI, and Python 2.5.1 and quite
> frankly I can't image it being any faster than it already is.  Pages, even
> ones full of images, simply pop.   The only time we ran into a so-called
> "slow" page was one we made that had about a dozen <<fullsearch()>>
> functions on a single page (took about 4~5 seconds to process). We changed
> it to <<fullsearchcached()>> and even that problem disappeared.
>
> When I've monitored it, the CPU and networking barely blip during regular
> usage.  And RAM-usage always remains about the same. Putting it on a faster
> box would just be a waste of hardware!  :-)

Moin is remarkably quick, but when your dataset is small enough to fit
into the OS's RAM (disk cache) your results can vary quite noticeably
from a site whose dataset is too large to be in RAM.

If you want to test the performance of your moin installation doing
full text searches usually does the trick. In the case of a dataset
too large to be cached you'll exercise the disk heads quite nicely.

However don't be surprised if your mainframe VM does better than you
think, since these higher end machines tend to have higher end I/O
systems. In that case you may find things like saving pages to be
faster on the VM than the workstation.

If you consider it, tasks such as svn/cvs and bugzilla are going to be
very disk i/o intensive since they must bypass the RAM cache for
writes and tend to be write heavy. I don't know about your source
control system, but mine is too big to fit into 4G of RAM along with a
bugzilla data store and a wiki. If so, that means that disk i/o will
be a contributing factor to the overall performance.

Instead of saying, "I don't want a vm, I want my OWN server. Hmmph."
maybe you should see if the vm solution will meet your needs. If so,
then what do you care as long as the end result is satisfactory?
(that's a rhetorical question) Consider testing your vm system under a
normal workload and checking if the performance is acceptable. If so,
then be happy. :-)

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode