local development WAMPserver performance issues..

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wipeout_dude's picture

Hi,

I am using WAMPserver on my local Windows7 PC for a development environment.. The issue is the performance is terrible!!

Adding APC doesn't help much, eAccelerator helps a little.. MySQL query caching won't work.. Page execution times are well over 1000ms on average for a relatively basic site without too many modules installed.. When I am iterating through changes quickly is really annoying having to wait so long between every page load.. My production server out on the internet responds much faster..

I have tried everything I could find on WAMPserver performance but nothing seems to help..

Has anyone got any suggestions?

Is WAMPserver a good platform to use or is there something better for development on Windows?

Thanks..

Comments

I can't really comment on

Pat Redmond's picture

I can't really comment on WAMPserver - I've never used it. But I have used MOWES which is OK, and XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html) which is really good. I would give that a go. If it isn't running well then it may well be an issue with your PC.

I used WAMP before and it

tsvenson's picture

I used WAMP before and it worked pretty well, but then I tried Acquia Dev Desktop and its a much smoother experience. Its basically a WAMP stack tuned for Drupal and with a great GUI making administration of your sites very easy.

I wouldn't worry too much about response times etc. Personally I would avoid running things like caching stuff when the environment is so different compared to the production site.

--
/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com

Move it to a server

HJulien's picture

I had the same issue with XAMPP. Windows 7 on a brand-new high-end desktop computer too. It was so slow that I had enough time after every save to make a coffee.

I solved the problem by moving my entire Drupal installation to webenabled.com where I pay $10 a month for development space. It serves me very well. They walked me through the entire process of moving it and now everything moves at a decent pace.

use virtualbox

john.lawson's picture

Create your own virtual server using Virtualbox and linux.

Thanks for the replies.. I

wipeout_dude's picture

Thanks for the replies..

I have solved it partly.. Seems that the anti-virus software realtime scanner causes major issues and completely wrecks anything APC tries to do.. In fact running with APC it runs slower.. Disabling the realtime scanner made things much faster and then adding APC gave it another little speed improvement.. Still not "fast" but a lot better..

I am thinking about the virtualbox option though.. When I have finished the current work and have a bit of time I will look at setting that up..

same here ... just added

Exlord's picture

same here ... just added exception to avast filesystem scan and worked ... much faster now ...

Installing PHP on Windows

spekkionu's picture

The recommended way for running PHP on Windows is with FastCGI. The other ways of running PHP (CGI, Apache Module, ISAPI Filter) are either slow, unstable, or both.
I believe WAMP installs PHP as an Apache module.

Installing php as a fastcgi through Apache is actually quite tricky and requires knowing what you are doing (there are very few tutorials out there).
The only full stack installer I've found that can install PHP as a FastCGI through Apache on Windows is the Zend Server stack which has both a free community edition and a paid enterprise solution. I've used Zend Server Community Edition quite a bit in the past and the only issue I've ever had with it is that it is very difficult to get the xdebug extension working with it as it conflicts with the build in Zend Debugger.

I have done manual installs of PHP and Apache for Windows and would only recommend it if you know what you are doing. One thing to note is that you must use the non-thread safe version of PHP and the versions of Apache from The Apache Lounge (will also need to download mod_fcgid while you are there). The official version from http://httpd.apache.org/ will not work through FastCGI.

Really though running PHP on Windows is probably easiest through IIS rather than Apache.

The easiest way to install PHP as a FastCGI in IIS is to use Microsoft's own Web Platform Installer. This will install everything you need to get up and running. Make sure to install the URL Rewriting module so your pretty urls will work correctly. The PHP Manager for IIS also makes managing things easier (also installable through the Web Platform Installer).

Drupal is bundles with a web.config (the IIS equivalent of the .htaccess file) file these days and is thus pre-configured to run in IIS as well as Apache. I've run into some issues with older versions of imagecache on Drupal 6 projects before but other than that I've had no issues running IIS instead of Apache.

Once you've got PHP installed I recommend installing the Wincache extension. It is built specifically for windows and works much better than APC, XCache, or eAccelerator on Windows machines. If you installed PHP through the Web Platform Installer you can use that to install it otherwise you need to download it and enable it like any other extension. I only see people talking about it for IIS but it also runs on Apache if you installed PHP as a FastCGI.

One of the many big improvements in PHP 5.3.x was vastly improved Windows performance. Upgrading to 5.3.x generally gives you a 40% speed improvement without changing anything else.

Regardless of the method used I recommend installing MySQL separately from the stack even when using a full stack installer. This makes it much easier to keep MySQL up to date. Installing MySQL is quite easy using the Official MySQL Installer.

@spekkionu - Awesome

wipeout_dude's picture

@spekkionu - Awesome information.. Thank you!! I am pretty good with Apache on Linux and have set it up with PHP in every way possible but the IIS option sounds interesting, purely because I have never done it before so might be a bit of fun.. :)

I don't think your issue is

2pha's picture

I don't think your issue is with wamperver itself. I have been using wamp for about 4 years now and have never had a problem.
I am running it on a machine that is about 5 years old now.
I haven't done anything special to wampserver, I always just install (when I need to install a new version) it and it works fine.
I have developed drupal 5, 6 and 7 site on wamp.
I think maybe you should look at what other processes are running on your pc.

EDIT.
I just saw how old this post was....:(

disable antivirus

maxxer's picture

I was having a similar issue on IIS 7, win 7 local machine. While its true my workstation is kind of garbage, it shouldn't cause simple PHP pages (even on Drupal) to take 10 seconds to render.

Solution for me was to disable realtime protection in Kaspersky. Performance is still not excellent (would read through other comments for further tweaking). But anti-virus monitoring was the real show-stopper.

Have you considered use a

joelwallis's picture

Have you considered use a VMWare machine with Ubuntu server? It's simple to setup and use, and you will have all the flexibility of Linux in your hands, including Drush.

The solution I have ended up

wipeout_dude's picture

The solution I have ended up with and that is working quite well is Virtualbox with a TurnKey Linux LAMP distro (http://www.turnkeylinux.org/lampstack) as a virtual machine..

Easy to setup, easy admin though the Turnkey provided interfaces and all the Linux command line functionality through the "webshell" utility they provide..

Add in Drush (which is easy to install) and you have the full solution ready to go..

The same problem here. Please help

supradhan's picture

I am facing the same problem with wamp. I have core i7 quad processor with 12 GB ram. But this drupal thing is not working well. It takes forever to load admin pages. I disabled update modules, disabled antivirus/firewall but there is not any changes. Please help.

Do yourself a favour and

wipeout_dude's picture

Do yourself a favour and install Virtualbox and a Turnkey Linux LAMP server.. Will make your life far easier and you can get the added benefits of Drush which is invaluable..

put this codes in ur my.ini

Exlord's picture

put this codes in ur my.ini or my.cnf file (mysql config file) :

innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2

and try these too if that didn't work :

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 70-80% of memory
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M

Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size

innodb_log_file_size =256M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M
innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 300
innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct = 90
innodb_thread_concurrency =8

Wamp server slow with drupal

najamkke's picture

I am sharing my experience with wamp server and drupal. I was having performance issues with wamp, i tried turning off my Anti-virus as well but it didnt work. Then i remembered skype has some issues with using the same port as that of wamp server which made me turn off skype and hurray wamp server is now working fine. Please try that it may resolve your issues as well. thanks

Adding my bit...

windows, php.ini:;

d9k's picture

windows, php.ini:

comment
; xdebug.remote_autostart=On

This line made drupal 5-10 times slower.

winginx server (php5-fpm)