Heres some loadtesting on opac-main.pl using straight CGI and no caching.


Maximum connect burst length: 1
Total: connections 20 requests 20 replies 20 test-duration 39.896 s
Connection rate: 0.5 conn/s (1994.8 ms/conn, <=20 concurrent connections)
Connection time [ms]: min 35438.7 avg 37343.4 max 39782.2 median 36828.5 stddev 1409.9
Connection time [ms]: connect 0.9
Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000
Request rate: 0.5 req/s (1994.8 ms/req)
Request size [B]: 64.0
Reply rate [replies/s]: min 0.0 avg 0.0 max 0.0 stddev 0.0 (7 samples)
Reply time [ms]: response 37135.8 transfer 206.7
Reply size [B]: header 167.0 content 1156.0 footer 2.0 (total 1325.0)
Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=20 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=0
CPU time [s]: user 3.82 system 15.69 (user 9.6% system 39.3% total 48.9%)
Net I/O: 0.7 KB/s (0.0*10^6 bps)

Heres some with caching switched on

Total: connections 100 requests 94 replies 94 test-duration 24.899 s
Connection rate: 4.0 conn/s (249.0 ms/conn, <=7 concurrent connections)
Connection time [ms]: min 90.9 avg 142.9 max 265.7 median 144.5 stddev 37.1
Connection time [ms]: connect 1.4
Connection length [replies/conn]: 1.000
Request rate: 3.8 req/s (264.9 ms/req)
Request size [B]: 64.0
Reply rate [replies/s]: min 0.0 avg 4.7 max 9.6 stddev 5.4 (4 samples)
Reply time [ms]: response 136.7 transfer 4.9
Reply size [B]: header 186.0 content 5847.0 footer 1.0 (total 6034.0)
Reply status: 1xx=0 2xx=94 3xx=0 4xx=0 5xx=0
CPU time [s]: user 8.53 system 14.22 (user 34.3% system 57.1% total 91.4%)
Net I/O: 22.5 KB/s (0.2*10^6 bps)

So without using the cache we were getting an average of 37343.4 milliseconds to reply. With the cache on that drops to 147.9 … which is a fairly serious saving. This is of course when the machine is under load. If we just run some basic curl tests
Without cache
time curl http://203.97.214.51:8080/
real    0m2.167s
With cache
real 0m0.105s

So that matches up with what we saw with the load testing

We cant of course cache this page if the user is logged in, but thats fairly easy to handle, just check if the user is logged in, if not, use the cache.
In the librarian interface there are significant sections of a lot of pages that change very infrequently where we could win a lot with some caching.
I’ve created a branch and will work in it some more, and also make it publicly available so others can test.