Performance: Better to use FastCGI or mod_php?

Question

Hi everybody,

one of our customers instances (Sugar 7.6 Pro) tends to keep getting slower as user base and data size grow, but I cannot pinpoint the source.

I have taken all the measures from the performance guide (no developer mode, not too many list items, no trackers, use Chrome, logging on FATAL, Opcache is in use), optimized the database just fine (running on its own server, no slow queries, InnoDB and Query caches, etc), the Apache webserver ist running the latest supported version of PHP (5.4) and we have only limited scheduler jobs running.

But still the system responds not too quickly, opening a record in the contacts takes nearly 4s.

We are using mod_php for our installation, is there any performance benfit fpr using FastCGI with SugarCRM 7?

On the other hand, I ran some performance test with Chrome, and it seems that nearly 3/4 of the page loading time is used for Scripting:

My client pc is pretty decent (Core i5, 8GB RAM, running Win 7 / Chrome from a SSD drive), so I suspect not much I can do here. Any other ideas where to look?

Greets,

Mark

Mark Willert · Accepted Answer

Second on Matt's comments about SSD, it definitely helps, especially at the DB level. A couple of other thoughts come to mind that I didn't see mentioned. First, there are multiple layers of caching that can all help performance. Opcode caching will help with the execution of the PHP scripts (and should be set to 3x the size of your Sugar directory - minus contents of ./upload), but there is also a user cache and the PHP sessions themselves. Are you using Redis, Memcache or similar technology for your PHP session management? If not, it is worth considering. As for the user cache, you could always combine APCu with Zend Opcache to get the user and opcode caching. On the Apache side, I would double check to make sure that you have mod_deflate enabled and configured to handle the following mime types: AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript application/json If your are using a load balancer, it is worth checking out if it can do the HTTP compression for you instead of using mod_deflate as it would take some load off the Apache server. Lastly on the Apache side, you might want to check the number of available servers/processes it is configured to make available. If your system resources allow it, you should increase those values. JSMin is a PHP extension worth looking at as well. You can install it via PECL and once installed, it should help reduce some of the time necessary for rebuilding your ./cache folder contents whenever you have a need to do so. With regards to using FastCGI versus Apache 2 Handler, etc., I have seen a mix of all of various handlers being used and can't say that I would bet on one as being the definitive source of improved performance. For example, I work rather closely with a large customer that uses php-fpm and their performance is pretty much on par as another similarly sized customer that uses the more common Apache 2 handler. Even within the broader PHP community there seems to be a lot of debating, and no definitive info, relating to using one versus the other, which also usually bleeds into discussions about using thread-safe versus non-thread-safe versions of PHP. Other than using SSDs, can you share more info about the hardware used for each layer? How many CPUs? RAM?