[Koha] Koha glacially slow

[Mark Tompsett]

Greetings,

Version 3.22 is still a month or so away from release. Because from a 
software perspective, I think Koha running Plack is your only hope. And that 
will be a feature available out of the box, if I am not mistaken.

However, your assumption of new hardware is a good place to start, in my 
opinion.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html
You will notice your CPU is listed near the bottom of the low to mid range 
CPU's.

I was playing around built a junk machine on partpicker 
(http://pcpartpicker.com/). I was thinking an Intel G3258 or AMD FX-4300 
3.8GHz Quad-Core Processor would be nice. They both hit the high range cpu 
page, and are relatively cheap. Anything on the high or mid-high lists would 
suffice. I personally don’t recommend anything lower, though if you have 
patience, lower is feasible to run Koha (just not well). And for the record, 
look at the benchmarks, Intel is rocking the list.

The other thing I found unusual is 3GB or ram. A lot of motherboards are 2, 
4, and if you get the really awesome boards 8 memory slots. It's usually 
recommended to match memory size and brand on slot pairs, particularly on 
Intel machines. You can take advantage of dual and quad channel memory that 
way. Also, given that your motherboard is likely an AM2 socket motherboard, 
and AMD has come out with 2 generations (AM3, AM3+) of sockets since then 
(and they are SLOW about that, making them a great upgrade option), I think 
a motherboard upgrade is in order for sure.

Depending on your budget and lifecycle plans, it is possible to get away 
with a $500 USD machine, but more money means a nicer machine which can last 
longer. Debian does a stable release every 2 years. I would recommend 
planning a computing budget for every 4 years at worst, because 7 years ago, 
I would suspect your CPU was low-end of the high list maybe high-end of the 
mid-high list. Now it's dropped 1-2 pages.

There may be some apache tweaks to speed it up, but replacing 7 year old 
hardware is probably a better place to start at this time. But if you can 
wait for 3.22, Plack may resolve your issues for less.

Hope this feedback is useful.

GPML,
Mark Tompsett

P.S. Remember database access is frequently hard drive access, unless you 
can cache your entire DB in memory ((1+(db backup size in GB 
/var/spool/koha/{instance name}/{files for same day} * 4 [because zebra is a 
memory hog, this might be possible with 3]) rounded up to a power of 2 -- my 
rough guess-timate), so an SSD might be nice. :)

P.P.S. This is also why the Koha community is working on Plack as part of 
the default install for 3.22 (if I am not mistaken), so script running 
(triggering disk access) can be cached in memory (add another 1 before 
rounding to the equation to be safe -- another guess-timation)

-----Original Message----- 
From: Aparrish
Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2015 12:22 PM
To: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] Koha glacially slow

Hello all,

Fresh install of Koha on a Debian Jessie computer. The machine has three
gigs of RAM and an Athlon dual-core 4050-e. It's about 7 years old so I'm
going to assume I just need a better PC, but this Koha instance (a local
test server through 127.0.1.1) is so slow it's literally impossible to use,
both staff and opac side. It takes about twenty seconds to resolve any
request at all. Everything else on the PC is quite snappy though. Am I
correct in my suspicion or is something configured incorrectly?