Extremely slow speed on my site using codeignitor... is this normal?

[eluser]alitech[/eluser]
I am not a techie and went with what was recommended to me by the people who initially built my site. They recommended codeignitor as it was a fast way to produce sites. I didnt really know much about this and went ahead with the recommendation. Now almost a year on, the site has been extremely slow as it has grown in site. It has about 150,000 page on it now and it is growing consistantly by about 200 pages per day. I plan to do product imports on the site which will push the number of total pages to over 10 million. This is going to be a complete nightmare as the server is constantly overloaded and the site responds extremely slow.

I have been kicked out by 3 service providers because of the load on the server the site causes. I am not on a dedicated maching with a quad core 2.8 GHZ proc, 8GB ram and 1TB hard disk. This has not helped either as the server goes down constantly because of the load. I have been monitoring Apache and the maximum traffic I can achieve is about 180 threads at the same time.

I am told that with codeignitor on every page load, the index page is referenced/loaded as well? Is that right?

Anyways, I know this is a public forum and I hate putting my URL out on support forums as its bad press, but I am at my wits end with this stuff. Please have a look at http://www.123vouchercodes.co.uk

I have had the code optimised a few times and there is still some more to be done, I will get that done as we go along. Any suggestions on what I can do here?


I am also attaching a screengrab of my google webmaster account for site performance. Its appalling as you can see.

[eluser]Burak Guzel[/eluser]
My first guess would be that your database might be overloaded. You have quite a bit of dynamically generated content on your front page. You probably would gain a big performance benefit by looking into caching, instead of running many database queries on every page load.

I haven't seen your code, so I can't really say what the problem is. However, it is highly unlikely that using CodeIgniter is the root of the problem.

[eluser]alitech[/eluser]
Thanks for your reply. I have enabled caching in the htaccess file. Is there a separate process for caching database queries?

[eluser]alitech[/eluser]
For some reason, I cannot see my attached file, here is the google sitemap performance screengrab

http://www.seocolony.com/siteperformance.png

[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
What kind of figures are you getting when using profiler? If you havent done that, then please do as it will give you much info what you can improve.

For caching database(and other stuff too) I recommed Cache library by Phil Sturgeon. You have lot of dynamic content and that is what this is meant to be used.

For example I have developed an ecommerce software that is ORM-driven and has a lot of database queries. With a very large category the queries could climb very high like 300-500. With caching, queries are lowered to about 5(and those come from session which arent cached) and most of the time site(s) run very smoothly.

[eluser]Burak Guzel[/eluser]
You can make sure that MySQL 'query cache' is enabled, and has adequate space. (I am assuming you are using MySQL.)

In many cases that can help.

But this is a complex issue in general. A programmer would have to look into the code to determine what can be optimized.

[eluser]alitech[/eluser]
Would the wuery cache be a coding effort or done at hosting? I have a fully managed server and have opened a ticket to check if this is enabled.

[eluser]alitech[/eluser]
[quote author="cahva" date="1276055742"]What kind of figures are you getting when using profiler? If you havent done that, then please do as it will give you much info what you can improve.

For caching database(and other stuff too) I recommed Cache library by Phil Sturgeon. You have lot of dynamic content and that is what this is meant to be used.

For example I have developed an ecommerce software that is ORM-driven and has a lot of database queries. With a very large category the queries could climb very high like 300-500. With caching, queries are lowered to about 5(and those come from session which arent cached) and most of the time site(s) run very smoothly.[/quote]

These are definitely interesting tools. I not aware of them being used on my site yet but I will ask the developer to implement these immediately to see if there is any information we can use. Regarding the cache library, I will have to ask my developer to study this properly. The page I went to does not give information on where to put the files on the host. It talks about how to make the code changes and allowing the server to write to cache folder. Where are these files placed?

[eluser]alitech[/eluser]
here is what my hosting guys say regarding the Mysql query caching

Hello Ali,

Yes, Mysql query cache is already enabled

---
root@ignito [~]# hostname
ignito.123vouchercodes.co.uk
root@ignito [~]# grep query_cache /etc/my.cnf
query_cache_size= 16M
root@ignito [~]#
---

Regards,

[eluser]Buso[/eluser]
check your error logging level, my site was slooOoOw, only because I forgot to set error logging to 1 (instead of 4)