Slow, 7+ Seconds Execution Time

[bpiper]

First off, thank you for Dataface! It is exactly what I was looking for and I serendipitously stumbled across it and have been loving it ever since.

Here's what I got: AMD K2-300 running Fedora core 5, and Dataface 0.7.1. I developed a mySQL database that ran on a different machine (laptop) and speed was not an issue. I was able to view, search, add, edit records in a reasonable time.

Fast forward to today. I have mySQL installed on a new Proliant server, and when I connect to the mySQL server and run a select * from tablex query, it comes back instantly. Yet, for some reason, execution times in Dataface have jumped to 7+ seconds. When I pull back all records from tablex, execution takes 13+ seconds. I have followed some optimization tips for linux and apache, but it only makes about .5 second difference. Nothing else has changed.

Any ideas?

[bpiper]

Okay, I lied. One other thing did change: The IP address of the box hosting Dataface. I adjusted the Dataface configs as necessary. Even ran makesite again to make sure I didn't miss anything, but got the same slow result.

[shannah]

Questions:

Is this new Proliant server running the AMD K2-300?
How big is the database?
Is mysql running on the same machine as the web server?

[bpiper]

Dataface, Apache, and PHP are running on the K2-300 box. The Proliant server is running mySQL and hosting the database. It is a very small database at this point, <100 rows.

What I don't get is how it worked fine before, yet as soon as I start running mysql on a different machine it seems to slow down the Dataface box. The SQL queries are lightning fast though.

[shannah]

There are two factors here that are bound to slow you down, so I'm not sure which one is killing your performance the most:

1. Issue: PHP is running on a different server than MySQL. Therefore each query you perform must go over the network, and its results must be sent over the network. Each request may need to make 10 or 20 queries... and some of them may need to transfer quite a bit of data. This could slow you down. How far apart are the 2 servers from each other? (i.e. Are they in the same room and connected by a super fast network connection... or do they need to connect over the to communicate with each other?)

2. AMD K2-300 is old and slow. Dataface really pushes PHP to its limits, and I honestly haven't tried it out on anything that old. All of my servers that I have been running it on usually have between 0.2 seconds and 0.75 seconds execution time... but these are all much faster than the K2.

Best regards

Steve

[bpiper]

The machines are connected at 100Mbps and traffic has to pass through two switches. I have tried connecting both to the same switch, but only get a tiny performance boost out of that. Even so, the switch is much, much busier than the one I used in my test environment. I imagine this is where the real bottleneck is.