Site performance work

The site is having a few performance issues... I worked last night to try and figure out the biggest causes and it seems mostly related to disk fragmentation on one of our database servers. I am taking some steps to work on that, but it might be a little while until it is fixed. According to the disk analyzer, a 32% performance increase will result from proper defragmentation. So we will get there eventually with the Diskeeper InvisiTasking technology... I hope...

Anyone else out there running data-heavy websites? How do you deal with your fragmentation issues on the data side? If you are using mySQL, how often do you run your index defrag (Optimize)?

I never thought Disk I/O would be something that factors into the performance of high traffic sites... Learn something new every day running this place!

Comments

[Jon]

I use PerfectDisk (www.raxco.com) on our web server. Handles large drives better and faster than Diskeeper and consolidates the free space nicely too.

[Trapper Markelz]

Thanks Jon, I will take a look at PerfectDisk.

[andyg8180]

Yeah, I've been testing PerfDsk as well at my job... Keep up is real nice and the UI is cake... I'm still evaluating it for another month before i span out to the production environment... Been using it for around 2-3 weeks after someone told me about it... Almost ready to pull the trigger and go full steam, but you know how things go in the world of "chain of command" lol...

It also works on Vista, and i know you said you have a vista machine... I dont know if you were talking about your lappy or your web server... But its vista friendly...

[Trapper Markelz]

Vista is on my new laptop... NOT on my server!! :)

Does PerfDsk run against live databases?

[andyg8180]

We run separate scripts to truncate and shrink our SQL logs and crap info on the database... But the perfdsk we were using to defragging the physical drive as tight as possible... We get a lot of clients that remote in to the servers and screw around... I'm not sure what was causing the server to fragment so much, so thats why we snagged PerfDsk... It has a warning system that tells you its time to defrag/optimize the machine, or u can set it to run automatically... I have it turned on but havnt gotten a warning yet...

theres a lot of features in it that im fooling around with... I think theres a free eval... We havnt run it against the live DB yet only because it has lots of financials pounding away at it and i want to make sure that if i run PerfDsk on the machine that it wont crap out... I'm sure it wont, but better safe than sorry...

I think it defrags ur metadata as well...

[andyg8180]

oh dude... are you taking about data??? i re-read your post again... We use Red Gate software for that... It walks you through your code and finds the slowest portion of the code as well as the bottlenecks on the query... After that, we run the heavy queries so that they get re-mapped... But im on sql-server not mysql so im not sure if there is a difference...

I always seem to have issues with my indexes... I think the easiest way to boost the performance is to drop the indexes and recreate them until you can find another answer better than mine...