We have a setup where a Drupal 7 site with the following setup - a VMware ESXi 4.1 host server running a web vm and an NFS VM. The web VM is using Apache and mod_php. The site is still in development thus we have to turn off all forms of caching due to the frequently-updated files.
Each page request takes around 15-20 seconds to complete. Profiling the PHP code shows that the vast majority of time (normally over 90%) is taking by all the is_dir(), is_file() function calls that load up the modules.
I've increased PHP's realpath cache size to several megs and an strace shows that the lstat calls then drop from over 200 to around 6 and stat() decreases a bit (around 600 calls). However, while this has shaved off quite a bit of time, I am simply unable to break past the 10 second per request barrier.
Is there a way to get better performance out of this setup that doesn't involve caching?
Configs and stats:
VMs:
web - Centos 6 64bt, 2.5GB RAM, normal CPU/HD prioritisation
nfs - Centos 6 64bt, 2GB RAM, normal CPU priority, high HD priority
PHP: 32M realpath cache size (it's this high for testing purposes)
NFS:
~]# egrep -v '#|^$' /etc/nfsmount.conf
[ NFSMount_Global_Options ]
Defaultvers=4
Ac=False
Rsize=32k
Wsize=32k
Bsize=32k
Reading speeds via NFS are not an issue a dd of a 100M test file using 32k blocks returns:
3200+0 records in
3200+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.84984 s, 56.7 MB/s
real 0m1.857s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.330s
Strace on Apache process with empty realpath cache:
% time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
50.78 1.157452 337 3434 28 stat
32.58 0.742656 628 1182 425 open
9.29 0.211788 762 278 1 lstat
3.17 0.072322 0 237865 write
2.45 0.055839 490 114 13 access
0.45 0.010262 43 237 brk
0.34 0.007725 10 811 74 read
0.28 0.006340 9 679 fstat
0.22 0.005069 18 281 poll
0.20 0.004533 6 698 getdents
0.09 0.001960 10 190 mmap
0.05 0.001065 14 74 accept4
0.04 0.001000 333 3 chdir
0.03 0.000750 4 190 munmap
0.01 0.000339 0 836 close
0.01 0.000247 3 75 writev
0.00 0.000068 0 611 fcntl
0.00 0.000063 1 77 shutdown
0.00 0.000000 0 1 lseek
0.00 0.000000 0 5 rt_sigaction
0.00 0.000000 0 1 rt_sigprocmask
0.00 0.000000 0 3 setitimer
0.00 0.000000 0 5 socket
0.00 0.000000 0 5 5 connect
0.00 0.000000 0 74 getsockname
0.00 0.000000 0 15 setsockopt
0.00 0.000000 0 5 getcwd
0.00 0.000000 0 1 futex
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
Strace after realpaths are cached
% time seconds usecs/call calls errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
60.14 1.371006 484 2831 28 stat
31.79 0.724705 627 1155 425 open
3.53 0.080354 0 237865 write
2.65 0.060433 530 114 13 access
0.43 0.009913 99 100 brk
0.38 0.008730 11 804 74 read
0.35 0.007910 12 675 fstat
0.30 0.006775 10 654 getdents
0.13 0.003065 11 281 poll
0.09 0.002000 333 6 1 lstat
0.07 0.001545 2 807 close
0.05 0.001063 14 74 accept4
0.04 0.001000 6 179 mmap
0.02 0.000404 2 179 munmap
0.01 0.000271 4 75 writev
0.01 0.000212 0 611 fcntl
0.01 0.000129 2 77 shutdown
0.00 0.000022 0 74 getsockname
0.00 0.000000 0 1 lseek
0.00 0.000000 0 5 rt_sigaction
0.00 0.000000 0 1 rt_sigprocmask
0.00 0.000000 0 3 setitimer
0.00 0.000000 0 3 socket
0.00 0.000000 0 3 3 connect
0.00 0.000000 0 15 setsockopt
0.00 0.000000 0 5 getcwd
0.00 0.000000 0 3 chdir
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
Mount:
nfs.xxx.xxx.xxx:/path/to/website/files on /path/to/website/files type nfs (rw,hard,intr,noac,vers=4,addr=xx.xx.xx.xx,clientaddr=xx.xx.xx.xx)
Any help is, naturally, appreciated.
