How to improve performance of my Joomla based Intranet system?

Question

I have a Joomla 1.5.10 based Intranet system. In this application, we have more than 80% custom extensions. Below is the configuration:

Apache version :    Apache/2.2.22 (Win32) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8
PHP version :   5.3.13
MySQL version : mysqlnd 5.1.11 

It has 3 dedicated Appliocation Server which configuration is :

Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition Service Pack 2
Compiler:   MSVC9 (Visual C++ 2008)
Architecture:   x86

Again, it has dedicated DB server which configuration is :

 8x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5460 @3.16GHz, 8.0GB RAM, Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition Service Pack 2.

Below is the MySQL settings in my system:

Sl.#    Parameter           Value
1   Key Buffer          547M
2   Sort Buffer Size    256K
3   Query cache limit   4M
4   Cache size          350M
5   Long query time         5
6   Interactive timeout 300
7   Max Connection          800
8   Thread cache size   36

We have configured WAMPSERVER (32 BITS & PHP 5.3) 2.2E on our servers and then install MySQL5.1 on other dedicated server. Hence, we are not using MySQL provided with WAMP. My system become too slow or crash when number of DB connection threads crossed 100. Number of logged-in users we can see are 3000-5000 only. Multiple queries start logging in the slow query logs and huge number of queries are in sleep state. Those queries which are running normal also start logging in slow query log and taking much time in execution. I am unable to find the bottlenecks in my system. Is there Joomla or MySQL creating bottlenecks. Would upgrade helpful to avoid the bottlenecks and increased the performance of our system? If yes, what should we upgrade - Joomla or MySQL and what will be the strategy to upgrade the system. Is there a known performance/scalability issue in 1.5.10 that is resolved by an upgrade?

My overall goal is to increase the system performance.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

First of all as mentioned in my comments, upgrading your CMS to atleast Joomla 1.5.26 will help. You're running PHP 5.3 and only Joomla 1.5.15+ is fully compatible with this PHP version. Seeing as you're using 1.5.10, there will be some issues there.

Apache is not an issue here. There are sites out there running Joomla that have thousands of users and run Aache without any problems, so not to worry about this.

From Joomla 1.6 onwards, the optimization started. Reduced and sorted database tables, endless bug fixes and also security issues. The framework has also improved majorly not to mention it supports PDO, mysqli (more secure than mysql) and postgre. Ugrading to Joomla 3.2 (latest version) will be of course a massive step. You will have to make all your custom extensions compatible with the new Joomla version and keep up to date with the latest coding standards. Even though this is a big step and will of course take some time, it's fully worth it. Joomla 1.5 hasn't been supported for a long time now and things are moving forward majorly.

Your server specs are good, you're running a decent PHP and Apache version, you're MySQL version could be upgraded however it's still not bad. So overall, it's not a server related issue.

I do think that it could very well be the way your custom extensions have been coded. So my final suggest would simply be taking a backup of your site and start migrating it and all of your extensions to Joomla 3.2.

Answer 2

You can change the webserver. Apache is totally bloat. Lighttpd can help to fix the problem. It' also simpler to run. A cms upgrade most likely break something.