[Koha] How to measure and improve Koha performance for our instance?

[Mike Lake]

Hi all

On 2022-01-17 5:16 pm, dcook at prosentient.com.au wrote:
> If you enable Plack/Starman, page loads and search times will be
> faster, because ........

So I decided to try out Plack as in my first reply:
> First step tonight will be to read up on configuring and turning on
> plack for the test instance. Then I'll toss up doubling cpu/ram
> before further tests.

That's where I started to get confused with the documentation on turning 
on plack. I started looking at the Wiki and found this: 
https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack
Is that up-to-date? It's quite detailed.

I noticed there was a /usr/sbin/koha-plack command. A bit of 
experimenting showed that running this:

     # koha-plack --enable libtest2

will uncomment the line "Include 
/etc/koha/apache-shared-opac-plack.conf"  in the Apache site 
libtest2.conf and then running this:

     # koha-enable libtest2
     # koha-plack --start libtest2
     # koha-zebra --start libtest2
     # koha-indexer --start libtest2

starts the test instance libtest2 and I have the OPAC and Intranet up 
with a number of starman and plack processes running.

I did some basic manual timing tests on how long it took to load a page, 
do a search for a book etc and it does not seem noticeably faster than 
the production system running on the same server.

Is the sequence below the right one for shutting down this test 
instance?

     # koha-indexer --stop libtest2
     # koha-zebra --stop libtest2
     # koha-plack --stop libtest2
     # koha-disable libtest2

Reading /etc/init.d/koha-common it looks like koha-common does all these 
things in the right order and I presume "systemctl restart 
koha-common.service" does this too. But I have not yet figured out how 
to stop or start instance "libtest2" without it affecting the production 
system (instance "opac") at the same time.

Then I'll get around to looking at optimal number of memcached, plack 
and rabbitmq daemons I should be running.

-- 
Mike