SID-02391: Hardware to Improve Performance

Status:	Asked	TWiki version:	6.0.1	Perl version:	5.10.1
Category:	CategoryPerformance	Server OS:	Centos 6.5	Last update:	7 years ago

I've done some benchmarking using different pieces of hardware to try and understand how the performance of TWiki can be improved but have run into a bit of a puzzle. I'm wondering if anyone could help me understand what I'm seeing.

We use TWiki to mange our drawing approval process, and our drawing web has roughly 2000 topics that we look up using SEARCH{}.

My initial thinking was that using a solid state drive would improve the performance, so I tested out the theory on a laptop. I tried a total of four scenarios, two were done using the TWiki 6.0.1 VM, using Virtualbox on Windows 10, with our Drawing Web contents added to (/pub and /data). The last two scenarios were done on an installation of Centos 6.5 (no virtualization). All scenarios were performed on the same laptop with only the HDD or SSD swapped out (formatted prior to each scenario to try to keep things as "clean" as possible). The laptop had the following specs: i7-3639QM @ 2.4GHz, 8 gig DDR3, Quadro K2000M (2 gigs). I ran Chrystal Disk Mark (Windows 10) on the HDD and SSD and the results were:

I don't fully understand the results, but I would believe that the performance of the SSD is significantly better than the HDD.

Now on to the benchmarking results. The times are the result of SEARCH{} on the Drawing Web.

Looking at top, when the SEARCH{} was running, one core was at 100% (user: apache, command: view).

I was a bit puzzled so I also benchmarked grep, specifically '''time grep –rnw ‘/var/www/twiki/data/’ –e ‘Extrusion’''', and got the following results.

As I mentioned, the results were not what I expected. I thought to try some further testing on a more powerful laptop. Xenon E-2176M @ 2.7 GHz, 32 GB ram, Radeon Pro WX 7100 (8 gig), SSD drive, using Virtualbox in Windows 10.

Would anyone have any insights into the results I'm seeing? I know that there are some software options to try and improve the speed of TWiki however the server hardware we're using is from 2012 and we are considering an upgrade. The challenging part is that I can't seem to pinpoint why I'm unable to show any kind of performance increase in my tests with "different" (either physical or virtualized) hardware.

Please feel free to ask any questions on my method or anything I've left out and I'll happily try to answer.

-- Jani Hamalainen - 2019-02-19

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