Gems page excruciatingly slow

[Ian Beatty]

Greetings.

I recently moved my department's Manila server from one machine to a 
different one, and at the same time upgraded from Frontier 7.x to 
Frontier 9. We're now finding that for Manila sites with more than a 
few Gems, the Gems page takes a ridiculously long time to get served. 
30+ seconds is not atypical. Other pages are sometimes slower than we'd 
like, too, but generally not that bad.

I've also noticed that every minute, the server load maxes out for 
perhaps 15-20 seconds. What's strange is that this occurs even if I 
turn off save-open-databases-every-minute (or at least I think I have, 
according to the admin website and the prefs in config.root).

Quitting and restarting Frontier reduces the every-minute activity 
duration somewhat, for a little while.

This new server is somewhat faster than our old one -- a Pentium II 300 
MHz (or so) with 640 MB RAM. The old one was a somewhat slower PII, but 
had a disk array (mirroring, not striping) and may have had faster disk 
access.

I really need help resolving this problem; Manila is so slow many times 
that it's become basically unworkable for us. If I can't get this 
fixed, we'll have to find a different solution for our course websites.

I can offer stats on number of sites, number of files in the Gems 
folder,etc. if that's helpful.

Thanks,

..Ian Beatty

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Dr. Ian Beatty, Webmaster          webmaster at physics.umass.edu
Department of Physics              voice: 413.545.9483
Univ. of Massachusetts             fax:   413.545.4884
Amherst, MA 01003-4525 USA         http://www.physics.umass.edu/
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