Poor performance in serving of static files

[Ed W]

On 18/07/2011 07:03, Jürg Lehni wrote:
> You are right, so here it is:
> 
> The same site running on Nginx:
> 
> http://lineto.com:81/The+Fonts/Font+Categories/Text+Fonts/Akkurat/Normal/
> 

Using Google Chrome, from London, UK.  I don't see any noticable
difference between the two sites, tested as of a few mins before this
email sent?

For performance tuning I find that either Chrome or Firefox with the
firebug plugin allows you to see the timings of all assets being loaded.
Delays are very easy to see and debug.  Note that Chrome seems vastly
faster and more efficient at loading massive quantities of image assets,
so be sure to test with both

I think next use some kind of benchmarking system to that you can test
say single assets repeatedly pulled and multiple assets pulled in
parallel.  This should help you figure out where the bottleneck is?

By now you should have spotted if you are IO bottlenecked, and if so
then also consider simple things like changes to logging (buffered or
non buffered), which can be stealing what little IO you have left?

If you haven't figured out whether you are IO bound then consider making
a small ram based cache drive and run the sites off those and disable
logging.  This should quickly give you an upper estimate of the
machine's capabilities and you can work down from there?  Obviously test
locally AND remotely and beware silly things like your ISP implementing
some upstream caching/filtering/throttling which is skewing your results?

Good luck

Ed W