1
bradburn
Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/4 18:19

  • bradburn

  • Not too shy to talk

  • Posts: 105

  • Since: 2005/1/26


Hi there,

I have read a lot recently about XOOPS being a very slow cms when used by a lot of people,

I am setting up an intrantet for use by about 200 people using xoops.

i would like to know if people have any experience of this kind of usage, and how slow it is likely to become.

Is XOOPS really as slow as I have read?
My site will have about 50 pages, including photo gallery.

Cheers for any comments,

Rob B

2
Mithrandir
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?

This site has often 200 consecutive users... and even though it is not incredibly fast, it is also on a rather old server.

If your hardware is fine, then your site will be fine.
Depending on the modules and blocks you are going to use, XOOPS is not (to my knowledge) noticeably slower than the platforms we usually compare with (Mambo, PostNuke, Drupal, Xaraya)

3
hyperpod
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/4 18:34

  • hyperpod

  • Quite a regular

  • Posts: 359

  • Since: 2004/10/4


Its only slow if you are doing something script intensive and receiveing ALOT of traffic at the same time (like most websites)

It is also HIGHLY dependant on your hosting service. and the way they configure their servers. It better be running linux if speed is an issue.

Alot of users would be like 150,000


200 is nothing when talking about web site load on the internet.


Cheers,

4
DonXoop
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?

"concurrent" users is the key. 200 concurrent active users all pulling up pages *can* a pretty heavy load on the typical hosted server. Having 1 million users in the database isn't a big deal, it is about how many are active at one time.

Then it is about how the site is configured and what content is in it. I've seen some pretty heavy sites that would choke on 100 users and other sites that could scale much larger.

5
tedsmith
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/4 20:54

  • tedsmith

  • Home away from home

  • Posts: 1151

  • Since: 2004/6/2 1


One word of warning from a fellow Xooper who's used XOOPS for an Intranet - either learn and configure Virtual Directories well for linking to files that may reside outside of your Intranet root or ensure the files that are necessary are on the same drive as the site itself. I've had loads of bother trying to get XOOPS to link to files stored on our internal netwrok using UNC paths (like \\server\folder1\document1.doc).

Other than that, we find it's great for our Intranet. It's works like ligething for us but then again we're using a gigabit network!

6
sudhaker
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/4 21:27

  • sudhaker

  • Not too shy to talk

  • Posts: 117

  • Since: 2003/2/6 2


Only 200 intranet users? This means there will be at max 4-10 concurrent request. HTTP is stateless protocol and even if everyone is online simultaneously, not all requests will arrive to server at the same time. XOOPS should work like charm But consider enabling caching if content permits that.

Let us know, how it goes?

7
Chainsaw
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/4 22:23

  • Chainsaw

  • Quite a regular

  • Posts: 304

  • Since: 2003/9/28


I'm using XOOPS as my office intranet. 250 computer users. Favorite use is searching for staff phone numbers and downloading official company forms.

I've used it on LAN, WAN, WiFI and the performance is outstanding.

I have a dedicated Celeron 1000 PC running Mandrake 9.2.

All I can say is ignore all those posts by people who say XOOPS is slow, or is slow with large number of users, or clunky, or difficult to use the CSS and/or templates or thing goes bump in the night. My experience is that is not the case, in fact XOOPS is a very strong contender with commercial CMS.

YOU need to install it and test for yourself. Your environment may be different from everyone else.

8
brash
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/5 1:33

  • brash

  • Friend of XOOPS

  • Posts: 2206

  • Since: 2003/4/10


Hi bradburn,

I think Chainsaw has pretty much nailed it on this one. XOOPS will never be as fast as a compiled language as it is based on PHP which is an interpreted language (processed on the fly). This by no means results in in being slow though. I have done some extensive performance testing on Xoops, and I have found that there are 6 major elements to making your XOOPS site fly;

1) Hardware must be adequate for the job. The main components getting hit in your system when web serving are CPU, RAM and HDD, and if anyone of these are vastly slower than the other then you will have a bottleneck. For instance, there is no use going out and getting a brand spanking new P4 3.4Ghz CPU with 1GB of RAM if you are only going to put the old 1GB HDD from your Pentium 100 in there. HDD performance is critical in high load situations, and I have tried helping users in the past where their hosts are using quad Xeon 2.4Ghz servers, but only using a single standard large capacity 7200RPM ATA-100 IDE HDD to serve everything from. This is not a good match.

2) Web server configuration. It makes no difference whether you use Windows & IIS, Windows & Apache, or *nix & Apache, and the suggestion above that you should be running Linux in a high load situation is quite simply incorrect. Our Windows/IIS intranet servers at work handle several thousand concurrent users everyday. The real key here is how you configure it to perform for your particular environment. With IIS for example (as IIS is my area of expertise) you get much better performance under high loads if you configure you PHP application mapping in ISAPI mode rather than straigh CGI due to the fact when using CGI the web app is loaded into and out of memory for every single request, where as with ISAPI the web app is only loaded into memory once where it can be used again and again for all requests. Then on top of that again you can greatly increase PHP performance by using an caching/accelerator such as Zend, mmcache or eaccelerator. You can also get further performance gains through performance tuning your MySQL environment, but I haven't explored that to any great depth at this stage. Yet another thing you can do on top of this is HTTP compression, which both IIS and Apache can do. What this does is compress appropriate files (text based such as CSS and HTML) on the fly which are then decompressed once delivered to the end user. This can not only greatly increase performance, but can also substaintially reduce your data bill for high traffic sites.

3) Choice of XOOPS modules. Finally we actually get to XOOPS . As indicated in these two articles I wrote;

Performance Analysis Of 4 XOOPS Article Modules

Performance Comparison Of NewBB 1 Vs NewBB 2

Performance can depend a great deal on which XOOPS module you choose to use. By rule of thumb all the XOOPS core module are very good performance and scalability wise. Outside of that though you are on your own as not all modules perform equally for a variety of different reasons. I suggest you read the two above article linked above.

4) XOOPS cache. This is one of the most underutilized features in Xoops, particularly when it comes to block caching. I would have to say that 99% of the people I have helped saying that XOOPS is slow did not have any caching enabled, or at the very least did not have block caching enabled. PHP is an interpreted language, if the HTML output it and Smarty produce are not cached, then it must be processed by the CPU. If it is cached then the HTML output is already there and can be delivered to the user as is. XOOPS blocks are the biggest offenders here as they are typically trying to collate a lot of data into a small space which can often bump up the MySQL queries and PHP execution times. Caching these blocks can quite easily double your XOOPS sites performance, I cannot stress how important it is to spend a decent chunk of time setting up your block caching if performance is a concern for you.

5) Site Content. This is back to basics really, but you only have a finite pipe between your server and your user. All content on your site must fit down this pipe, so unless your on a LAN you need to be concious of this and try to only include minimal relevant content, particulary on your front page as it will get the most traffic.

6) Your XOOPS theme. Lots of graphics certainly does do a lot for visual appeal, but it can have a massive impact on your site performance. This comes from three fronts. Firstly all graphics must be downloaded by the users browser, and if there are a lot of them and if not optimised can really strangle performance. The second front is that each and every image produces a HTTP request, and while graphics are cached by your users browser when downloaded for the first time, HTTP requests are executed evvery single time the page is loaded. The third front is latency, and is directly tied to HTTP requests in regards to how it effects your site performance. If you have a user on a 56k connection trying to connect to your site from the other side of the world then it is very likely they are looking at a latency of 500ms or above. Not much on it's own, but if you have 100 HTTP requests or more in your website it is very easy to see how this latency issue will quickly make your site unusable for this user.

You need to remember your site is only as fast as the slowest link, so if the majority of your users are still using standard 56k analog dial-up connections (which is still the most popular connection medium worldwide) it is irrelvant that your site might be hosted on a dedicated 1.5mbps T1. It is all about knowing your audience.


Anyway, sorry for this bable of crap, but hopefully you can pick through it and find some useful pointers. Moral of the story is that XOOPS is a perfectly capable race car, how it performs relies very heavily on the drivers ability .

9
bradburn
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/8 13:15

  • bradburn

  • Not too shy to talk

  • Posts: 105

  • Since: 2005/1/26


I appreciate all of your thoroughly excellent advise and comments, It is so good to have such a great community. I guess it will be as fast as its going to be.
Loading files on the existing Intranet is perfectly fine so hopefully the speed at which files load should be fine with XOOPS too. Im sure it will be a little laggy (especially now I have included the excellent XOOPS gallery 1.33) but hopefully no one will mind.

Im sure attracting users will do nothing to help the speed of the site, but does anyone have any ideas of other modules that might increase people using the intranet. I did see an excellent map module that you could drag-and-drop little figures on to your holiday location. Something like that would really increase traffic in an office like this. Any more suggestions would be gratefully appreciated..

Rob B

10
hyperpod
Re: Is xoops as slow as they say?
  • 2005/3/8 14:22

  • hyperpod

  • Quite a regular

  • Posts: 359

  • Since: 2004/10/4


Personally, I'm disgusted by the Miscrosoft licenses for their Server OSs, lack of a good default configuration, and (did i mention security?).

Thats why I install Linux in every office I touch.
And am actively converting all server rooms to *nix like OS's, such as Linux.

Linux is fast, easy, free and works great out of the box. (or download in this case)


So any office that needs to build a server, what's better, an OS with open standards that can be downloaded and installed for free and reasonable default configs and security OR a propietary OS, which will cost money to license and needs heavy configuration to make it work as desired...did I mention security?

Alot of people using Windows have been pirating it anyway.
Not really possible to pirate Linux, LOL.
If people actually paid for Windows, my opionion is they would switch to Linux or something silimar in 5 seconds.

My opinion, Windows has its place, just not as a server. Thats just MY opinion.


Off topic I know, but in context with this thread, anyway.
Also, I love to be corrected, thats how I learn more... so if anything I typed here isn't true, please correct me.


Best Regards,

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