Dear Drupal community,
We would like some advice and maybe further collaborations regarding a Drupal-based project, specifically concerning performance issues.
First a few words about the project: www.greatfirewall.biz. We are the only website which continously monitors the firewall of China - probably the worlds most sophisticated online censorship and certainly the one affecting the most people. Our aim is to provide transparent information on trends and changes of the censorship, as well as a basic tool to check whether a certain website or Google search is blocked or not. If you help us out on some issues regarding our Drupal-based website, you are also assisting in working for an free internet. Thank you.
Now, the issues. Our website is very slow and we don't know why or how to fix it. Many pages take more than 20 seconds to load which is both irritating and hurting our search engine ranking.
If you visit the website - http://www.greatfirewall.biz - you may initially find it fast enough. That's because we've enabled the Boost module meaning that you're often hitting static pages. These have to be regenerated of course and that takes time.
Some info on the website.
Core: Drupal 7.0.
Contrib modules: adsense devel metatags_quick styles views_php wysiwyg ajax_poll boost ctools entitycache globalredirect mollom references token xmlsitemap apc customfilter google_analytics media pathauto smtp views (plus some self-made modules).
PHP Info: http://www.greatfirewall.biz/phpinfo.php.
Web host: EC2. m1.small instance-store. 1.7GB memory. 10GB disk.
TOP snapshot:
top - 09:15:42 up 60 days, 6:35, 2 users, load average: 5.36, 5.42, 5.70
Tasks: 74 total, 2 running, 72 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 41.3%us, 1.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 57.1%st
Mem: 1741016k total, 1671312k used, 69704k free, 49224k buffers
Swap: 917496k total, 7564k used, 909932k free, 1320304k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
28737 www-data 20 0 80116 39m 23m R 13.2 2.3 0:02.16 apache2
28750 www-data 20 0 74488 34m 23m S 11.6 2.1 0:01.86 apache2
28675 mysql 20 0 391m 65m 6232 S 6.6 3.8 0:12.20 mysqld
28743 www-data 20 0 74988 35m 23m S 4.3 2.1 0:02.03 apache2
28651 www-data 20 0 74676 35m 23m S 2.6 2.1 0:04.57 apache2
28754 www-data 20 0 74476 34m 23m S 2.6 2.0 0:01.83 apache2
28576 www-data 20 0 74140 34m 23m S 2.0 2.0 0:05.16 apache2
1 root 20 0 2812 988 660 S 0.0 0.1 0:08.53 init
Actions taken so far:
- Enabled APC. This seemed to speed up the website initially but it appears that something happens after a while which brings performance down again.
- Increased Mysql's key_buffer from 16M to 256M.
- Enabled the Entitycache module.
- Ran a lot of Apache benchmarking (ab).
Do you have other ideas for what we could do? All advice very welcome! We would also be interested in more significant contributions if you want to collaborate. You can reply here or email us at greatfirewall.biz@gmail.com.
By the way, the website is blocked in China, but we have a mirror accessible at https://122.248.216.0. If you are in China you can use that to access the website.
Thank you!