Hoping for some feedback on improving my site's performance

Posted by vood002 on August 21, 2012 at 1:18am

I hope I'm posting this in the proper place.

A client of mine is running Drupal 6 on IIS7, and has started getting more traffic (about 6000 hits/day, 98% anonymous) resulting in server CPU (2GHz Xeon) being completely maxed.

I'm trying to find the bottleneck, and I've stumbled on something which I'm not sure what to make of: In trying to debug Boost's performance on this server I inserted a watchdog notice in hook_init() and found that any page load can fire hook_init() as many as 20 or 30 times.

This has to be a bug right? I don't believe hook_init() should ever run more than once, with the possible exception of asynchronous events that may fire bootstrap.

I can't find anything in my code that could be causing this issue. If anyone has any tips on debugging it I would greatly appreciate them!

Comments

Don't forget to look at the forest.

Posted by lotyrin on August 21, 2012 at 4:52am

Even if you found a interesting-seeming tree.

Get XHprof set up. Consider using New Relic.

Actually figure out where your performance problems are, then tackle them in order based on resource cost.

Where did you put the watchdog? In somemodule_init()? Otherwise it might be running several times because you have greater than one module with an init.

I would recommend getting a

Posted by pdrake on August 21, 2012 at 12:45pm

I would recommend getting a free trial of new relic or tracelytics to see what is going on. The detail view in tracelytics of a single process would help identify where or why you are seeing things like hook_init fire multiple times.

Thank you

Posted by vood002 on August 21, 2012 at 2:04pm

Thank you for the responses!

Where did you put the watchdog? In somemodule_init()? Otherwise it might be running several times because you have greater than one module with an init.

Yep, in somemodule_init()

Going to try New Relic first since it looks like it will run on Windows, hopefully I can track this down.

Just one module?

Posted by kbahey on August 21, 2012 at 5:29pm

So you are saying that just one module's hook_init() is being fired 20 or 30 time per page view?

Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
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Yes

Posted by vood002 on August 21, 2012 at 6:26pm

Yes...that's what I'm seeing.

I believe this morning I've narrowed it down to an imagecache issue, at least it I've determined that hook_init() is being invoked when (some? any?) images are requested from the server. Not sure if it is normal practice for drupal to bootstrap when an imagecache image is generated, but I'm a little closer. This is certainly the performance issue I've run into, i've tabled php profiling until i get this one solved.

Thank you for the response!

Ah.. imagecache.

Posted by lotyrin on August 21, 2012 at 7:29pm

If a path in files doesn't exist, it gets handled by Drupal (this is how imagecache is able to generate the files).

If a file can't be generated (invalid path), then it will continue to happen.

Fix your 404s and you should see relief.

I've seen imagecache need to

Posted by dalin on August 21, 2012 at 8:04pm

I've seen imagecache need to regenerate a file every time if the filename contains any non-ascii characters. To get around this you can use Transliteration module
http://drupal.org/project/transliteration

Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

Simillar case here, Drupal 6 on IIS7 being slow

Posted by Abyooda on August 21, 2012 at 9:18pm

I checked New Relic compatibility and it is not compatible with IIS7, I used an IIS7 shared server also and have a slow website too, I hope I can find a module to examine the problem, i guess when i will get fedup I will use Netbeans to debug the website (maybe yes maybe no).

@vood002 do you mean that calling the images from the database will make the website faster, because I also upload my images (which are not so much) from the server via ftp and call it from my website using '<'img srs'>' (you can see the html code yourself) and all this because the .htaccess file keep creating in site/default/file hope i got it right.

I am not a php developer but any .Net software engineer can understand what you are talking about

my website
http://www.StrongerStudents.com

Maybe You could, for

Posted by Jānis Bebrītis on August 31, 2012 at 7:18am

Maybe You could, for debugging purposes (if you really want to find out what's going on there), install virtualbox, do a quick ubuntu-server install and set up casual LAMP stack on it. shouldn't take more than 2 hours to set all up, but you'll be able to do in-depth debugging later on.

my issue was with imagecache

Posted by vood002 on August 21, 2012 at 9:18pm

@Abyooda:

I was experiencing a specific problem, which i eventually tracked down to some manual calls to imagecache, requesting images such as /sites/default/files/imagecache/preset/sites/default/files/images/image.jpg

I believe it was a rewriting issue, the result was that drupal would generate the file in the directory /sites/default/files/imagecache/preset/ (ignoring the rest of the directory structure), then when it was requested again drupal would perform another bootstrap since the file was not at the expected location.

I did find a very helpful thread on general IIS7 performance here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/60283

@all other responders: Thanks for the input and support. You helped me track this issue down and the site in question is out of red alert status.

Thanks Alot

Posted by Abyooda on August 21, 2012 at 9:24pm

I guess a quick solution to just throw your images into /sites/default/files/imagecache/preset/ and see what would happen if I am not wrong.