Newbie: SQL Caching ?

[Stosh]

Hi,

There seems to be a problem with my hosting** service's SQL server policies.

I've been having trouble with delayed responses from blog pages. They are sometimes snappy, but at other times they can take (on average) 20-50 seconds. Sometimes it's even worse (I counted a few up in the 90s, and two went over 100 seconds). The 20-second delays are enough to shake off the search-engines, so it's an issue.

I called their help-desk about it and spoke to a very nice guy who said he "might" escalate it. He asked if serendipity had an SQL caching plugging (I think that's what he called it). Apparently one of the other blogs has such a thing, that responds with cached information when there have been no modifications made to it.

Anything like that for s9y yet?

Any other suggestions (I've already tried my three PHP options cgi/fast/module).

Like I said, this point may be moot. Perhaps they will just fix their DB access and loading policies (the other parts of the site are quite snappy), but it would still be nice to know.

Thanks for any help you can give regarding this.

Also, perhaps in a related-topic: Can anybody recommend a good DNS registrar and hosting service?

-Stosh


** ( bulkRegister / enom / ehost-services.com )

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Serendipity does have two caching plugins. One is available as an option of the entryproperties plugin, the other is called "Simple Cache" and available on Spartacus. The latter has some drawbabacks because it caches information and thus some dynamic plugins might not operate.

That depends on the plugins you are using; tell us which s9y version you are using and which event plugins? Also, are the response times only for the HTML page, or does maybe some javascript or other process stall the browser subjectively?

Best regards,
Garvin

[Stosh]

Hi Garvin.

Thanks for responding.

The version is 1.0

The help-desk did escalate and I was informed that there were some problems with the DB server's configs. These seem to have been taken care of.

There are still occasional slow renders, but i am starting to think that these few remaining issues have more to do with the youtube videos that are often displayed on the pages. The help-desk guy actually wrote a little PHP test program that does direct text accesses into the DB (thanks Patrick). This test program serves as an Ockham's razor that allows me to bypass many of the variables that otherwise clutter the issue.

The site is still new and untraveled, so an upgrade, or even a fresh install to the latest and greatest would be possible.

I certainly don't want to do anything that limits the plugins I can use though, so any advice on a cache would have to be for the "better" one in that regard.

Thanks again Garvin.

-stosh

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Serendipity 1.0 is now 4 years old. You might want to upgrade, several bugfixes and improvements have been made.

Then I believe in most cases you shouldn't have any performance issues. Come back here though, when it does

Regards,
Garvin

[Stosh]

Garvin,

That's strange. I just downloaded and installed this a couple of months ago from scratch... I was just using the "powered by" message at the bottom of the page (template?) to answer your question. Could it be wrong?

I'll go dig deeper...

Ok, the one on the admin screens says: "Powered by Serendipity 1.4.1 and PHP 5.2.12". Would that be more accurate?

Most of the problems were from the SQL server configuration. There are still occasional hiccups, where there are long load-times. Though they are tolerable, if there's a solution that could make them fewer or shorter, I'd certainly want to include it.

Thanks for all your help. I'll probably be hanging around like a pesky little brother until I get past the newbie stage

-stosh






-stosh

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

1.4.1 sounds much more reasonable, yes. You mightr have looked at a version number of a template, instead of SErendipity itself?

You can try to go to the s9y configuration and disable the options that say something like "Read-privileges for Categories" and "extended database lokups". That might save you a few performanbce cycles for SQL.

HTH,
Garvin

[Stosh]

Thanks Garvin.

I'm using the category-based privileges, but the other one: "extended database lookups" might be fine to shut off... If I could find it.

Where might that one be?

-stosh

[garvinhicking]

Hi Stosh!

Ah, that option should hide inside the "Extended options for entries" plugin, if you've got it enabled.

Regards,
Garvin

[Stosh]

Garvin,

Thanks.

Not applicable. I don't have the extended option for entries plugin installed.

It seems to be okay these days (occasionally it still slows down when going to an individual entry from the index page, but it is anybody's guess where that delay is being introduced).

The cache probably wouldn't help, should this continue to be a problem with my hosting providers.

-stosh