Fastest servers?

Riverman · 9th January 2008

Hi,

I am looking to speed up page load times on one of my websites, currently I have a Virtual Dedicated with 256MB (1GB busted), the website is database driven linux - mysql - php, with lots of photos and lots of search results to display. The site has 4-5 visitors maximum at any one time and only at peak times, 2-4,000 unique visitors a month

If I upgrade to a core 2 duo with 4GB of ram how much difference will this make to page load time? if a php page takes 5 seconds to load now, how long will it take with a higher spec server, ( 4 seconds?) ?

also most of my visitors are from the uk, so will a server based in the UK instead of the U.S) help page load time? or will the difference be so small(fraction of a second) that I will not see any real benefit?

Based on the above and bearing in mind that page load speed is top priority, what do you reccomend? do some hosting companys offer faster servers than others?

Thanks

JonWitte · 9th January 2008

Bit of a "Piece of string" question, but broadly speaking, if the slow bits involve lots of php/dbthen a faster box will help. If it's the time to send a big/lots of image/s then move to the UK and get a faster connection.

JamesSykes · 9th January 2008

That all depends on how contended your current solution is.

Most VPS offerings whether Xen/VM or whatever should allow a single VPS to utilize the CPU fully if it's not in use by others so in that scenario you might not see a difference.

That's probably quite unlikely though as you could potentially have 10-20 or more VPS's on the same physicaly server and in that case you are probably going to see a big difference switching to a dedicated server. Potentially 10 times as quick.

othellotech · 9th January 2008

RAM will have a muc bigger influence on the performance of your gallery than raq cpu (unless the node you are hosted on is masively oversold) - I'd suggest asking the current host to trial an upgrade to 1Gb as a test.

And yes, being in the UK on a decent network will have an impact on the delivery time and serach-engine results of your site.

netserve · 9th January 2008

Server and UK network are important but to speed up a db driven web site, think outside the box. Check your code and if possible look at a php accelerator for the site.

Also consider how much of the site really needs to be running from a live database. ie can you create a static cache of pages from the DB when the database changes and then serve static pages?

(We took over a site running on 5 servers and by the time we'd hacked the code, it was down to needing one server)

pipeten · 9th January 2008

Not answering your questions, but putting together "1GB busted" and "lots of photos" would it be fair to say you're storing those images in MySQL? 2-4k uniques should be able to be handled within what you have currently (though indexes on large tables for the searching may not). More likely to be a coding/implementation issue than one of requiring a larger box (even though I dislike VPS and 256MB is a bit measly).

Karl · 9th January 2008

Code optimisation will give you the biggest increase, also make sure that you're using mySQL Caching as well (we've seen that increase performance massively). If you're storing the image data inside the DB, stop, store the images on the filesystem and store a pointer in the DB. RAM will make a lot more difference than CPU will, when you've only got 256MB guaranteed right now.

Jack21 · 9th January 2008

Best solution is to optimize and possibly resize images when they are uploaded.This would give you better speed in page load time. Again, a server with 4 GB of RAM dedicated to your site would give you much better page load time than a shared one.