CI-based Web Sites Performance

[eluser]Chris J Smith[/eluser]
Interesting thread.

This is somewhat predicted and somewhate tested. We're not live yet!

Is your web site small, medium or big? How 'heavy' you think it is?

Medium. We're taking on 37signals' rubbish. Death to rails, death to hype!

How fast is it? How much time it takes to load the front page? How much time it takes to load when you click a link?

Always < 1 sec on 1Mbit pipe.

How many simultaneous users your web site can tolerate?

Target is 50 requests per second for scaleout phase 1.

Is your hosting shared or dedicated? If shared, have it limitations? If dedicated, which is your server's configuration (CPU, memory, hard disk, etc)?

Dedicated - Custom 2x 2.4GHz Xeon, 4096Mb RAM, 2x 76Gb WD Raptor.

How much server's memory is your application using for all simultaneous requests?

No idea - the thing has 4Gb of memory in it though (mainly for memcache and mysql from day 1 - we really have bigger problems than PHP memory usage)

- Are you using CI cache?

No we're using memcache - need something scalable if I need to scale up quickly.

- Are you using any PHP cache like XCache, eAccelerator or APC?

APC.

- Are you using sessions? Which kind of session are you using: cookie, PHP native or database?

Not really. We have a cookie stores a GUID session token. This is recovered and the user and tenant retrieved per hit (mainly from memcache).

- Does your web site builds the all the pages from a database or is mostly static content?

All pages are dynamic. Heavy caching stops us from hitting the database too hard.

Are you using Active Record or raw queries?

Raw queries - they are easier to tune.

Are you using a template parser or only pure PHP code?

Pure PHP.

Is there something special you did to get more performance when your web site access hit the sky?

Celebrate?! Not hit that yet!

Do you think CI gives you more performance than the old way you made your applications? Why?

No - it is significantly cheaper to build and deploy with though which makes its performance a good trade-off versus cost.

What do you think about your CI-based web site running in a cluster configuration? Will it work fine?

It will work fine - we've tested it on VMware server ;-)

Is there something more you would like to say about the framework performance?

Do you know something faster or lighter than CodeIgniter?

ASP.Net with SQL 2005 destroys it on every level but that's PHP and MySQL's fault, not code igniter. Unfortunately SQL2005 is prohibitively expensive both in initial cost and staffing.