[Koha] Very small library, low-end hardware

[Chris Cormack]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 08:54:39PM -0700, Larry Stamm said:
> paul POULAIN <paul.poulain at free.fr> writes:
> 
>     > Rich Churcher wrote:
>     >> 1. What is the absolute, barest minimum hardware you would
>     >> consider installing Koha on, given that the database is not
>     >> likely to be very large?
>     >> 
>     > I've installed Koha on a Celeron 600, with 192MB RAM & 20GB HD.
>     > (server & client). The librarian finds it too slow. It's a problem
>     > with Perl compiling i think.  I tried on a 350MHz PC (server
>     > only). It's unuseable : 5 seconds for every page, minimum.
> 
> My testing box at home is a 266Mhz AMD K-2 with 160Mb RAM.  While I
> wouldn't exactly call it speedy, it serves up most pages in less than a
> second with a database of 14,000 + entries to search through.
> 
> In console mode using a text only browser, it's fast enough to use for
> real work.
> 
> But I agree that perl seems to be the slowest link in the query chain.
> I've played around some with writing gawk scripts to query the MySQL
> database and it seems to return the results much faster than perl does.
> I've no idea why though.
> 
Yep, I think to get some real speed increases, we'd need to look into
mod_perl and Apache::DBI to get some connection pooling.
I suspect that starting up perl, and making database connections are 2 of
the bottlenecks.
But once we get 2.0 out, we can do some work with the profiler tools and spot
any bottlenecks and fix them.

Chris

-- 
Chris Cormack                                                     Programmer
027 4500 789                                       Katipo Communications Ltd
chris at katipo.co.nz                                          www.katipo.co.nz