Performance Tuning – How to boost it up?

Hi, my name is Viet from Septeni Technology.

I’m glad to notice that we’ve jut finished the tunning project to improve performance. So I want to share with you about our experiences in practice.

step 1. PROFILING

* detect standard time consumming for a basic requests.

the simpest tool to realize this is firebugs, other good tool is xdebug + WinCacheGrind; with SQL queries you can set configuration at my.cnf to logs all slow log queries.

Other simple way is set judged point of time and echo consumming time like this

$t = time();
functionX();
if(DEBUG){
     echo  (time() - $t). "s functionX <br/>";
     $t = time();
}

step 2. DETECT FOR BOTTLE NECK FUNCTIONS

follow the 80/20 rule, you dont need to focus all components, functions. find out the most important functions/features effect to performance of your system. After profiling system at step 1, maybe you got them.

* set a goal

an acceptable response time for each actions.

step 3.IMPROVE SKILLS & KNOWLEDGES

– business of systems: you should never start to tun until you undertand how your system is working .

– learn best practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site  http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

–  study how to use these tools ( for client side optimization)

• Google PageSpeed
• Yslow
• Firebug

– database design

– data modelling : OLAP/OLTP, datawarehouse, best practices

– query optimization

– cache & noSQL system: is it need? which is the best choice for your system?

step 4. TUNING

* bottle neck functions

– you should consider the algorithm to resolve it. So offcouse, you need smart man with good background to solve it effectively.

* client side

let consider about these technicals:

– css sprite

– minify

– client cache (set header)

* data transfering:

reduce time for data transfer from host to client, with host locating outside of country, it’s so important, let image: network dowload speed can be 15kb/s; and you have 1.5mb to display the page. after gzip, you need to download only about 300k! you save many times!

this can set by mod_deflate of apache setting.

* SQL optimization

the most important factor for performance, almost time spent at server side is SQL queries. SQL optimization maybe is the most important skills to improve performance of web response.

– run explain query to understand why it’s slow.

– minimize fields selected in select query

– minimize number of table joined.

– check for indexes of tables

– change the way to query, devide it into some case for different condition, thinking about UNION, UNION ALL, LEFT OUTER JOIN, LEFT JOIN, INNER JOIN. You must understand the diffencies.

– material view ( depend on SQL engine, but mySQL ‘s not supported now)

– redesign db structure: reduce size of a field if we can

– db partitioning

– build sumary table

* Cache

– pre-build data and set to cache layer.

– cache layer is the key factor for OLTP system, but not in an OLAP system. But I want to build it for realtime statistic in nearly future.

* Optimize server setting

– MySQL setting

– Apache/web server setting

– PHP setting, enable opcode cache.

– OS tuning

I reserved these works for the system administrator =))

Improve performance of a system is not a easy mission for dreammers.

There’re many technical solutions  to apply, we can learn them . But the key factor to tun it successfully is human resource. I’ve got good members, so we overcame! Thank you for your contribution in this project : Bùi Hữu Diệp, Lê Quốc Đạt, Ngô Tuấn Long, Phạm Lê Lợi, Nguyễn Đình Thức.  And we – development team also want to say thank you to SQA team, nice girls!

This is reporting by Viet from Septeni.

Thank you and good bye!