UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting Improving Perl performance?

I have a fairly fast server (1GHz P3, 768MB RAM, RAID-5 Ultra 160 SCSI) using Windows 2000 SP2 and IIS 5.0.

But I have more and more traffic and problems with keeping up with the PERL requests. Sometimes I have more than 20 request in queue in the task manager.

I tried to install the ISAPI Perl instead of the usual Perl.exe but I got lots of problems with missing files and the whole IIS service crashed more than twice a day - nothing I appreciated...

What can I do to speed it up? (yes, I am using the .PHP accelerator with more than 40% cache requests)

I have about 650.000 pageviews per month (counted by the UBB control panel) currently and increasing every month.

Solutions anyone? I have a new server coming soon, but is "brute force" the best solution?

Ok - the new server arrived today and we have installed it and its online.

Someone talked to me and said that our RAID-5 array could be a part of the problem - its not optimal for the small files that UBB uses. Could this really present a problem?

The new server is a 2.4GHz Pentium Xeon and we made a Raid-1 array (mirror) which is supposed to be the fastest type of RAID. Do I need to tell you that the site is fast now?

BUT: Is this really true - do you need brute force like this? Or have I misconfigurated something...

Our site:
http://www2.99mac.com/
(its in Swedish)

PerlIS has some problems as far as I know... and not as stable as perl.exe, also UBB is not 100% compatible with it I think (Charles Capps can give info about that)

You may find better performance if you run appache than IIS. But, apache 1.3.x doesn't run so hot on windows (not for a production level anyway), and 2.0.x is still fairly new so you need to thouroughly test before using

PerlIS gave us a real headache - it is a bit faster than perl.exe but it also kept using up all our RAM from time to time making the whole IIS service to halt.

I can't recommend anyone to use PerlIS!

My real question: How many pageviews per month should a 1GHz server be able to handle without bogging down to a almost standstill? What is your experience?

Our new server is fast - but it slows down somewhat after 48 hours of operation. The Perl requests sometimes freezes for a couple of seconds even when the server is at 0% activity!

We are experiencing the same problems now - what can we do to add some speed to our Active State Perl?

UBB runs better under Linux/Apache by far. Also I beleive CC has started to integrate mod_perl functionality (minimal) in to the latest UBB release.

Do you restart the webserver application every day? Possibly's helping you...