I recently read this article about tuning Ext3 file system for better performance. I was doing a fresh Ubuntu 7.10 install on my laptop, so I decided to see how much this would affect to my every day Plone development.
On Linux, every time a file is read, its access time attribute is rewritten. This causes a lot of unnecessary writes to file system. Since there are only few rare application needing this feature, turning of the feature can give a nice performance boost on systems dealing with large amount of files.
Plone 3.0 has 10000 files. A lot of them are read during the start-up. Maybe I am getting somewhere here…
When you are doing Plone development, you need to restart Plone often. I used this highly scientific method to measure Plone start-up time from issuing zopectl fg to getting the front page load completed in Firefox. I warmed the file system cache beforehand by doing two dry runs.
I also did some simple front page bombing with ab tool.
System setup
- HP nx9420 laptop (5400 RPM hard disk)
- Plone 3.0.2/Zope 2.10.4
- Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 Ghz
- Ubuntu 7.10
- Applied following Ext3 options: noatime, data=writeback
Out-of-the-box filesystem
Lap 1: 23s
Lap 2: 22s
Lap 3: 22s
ab stats:
Concurrency Level: 10 Time taken for tests: 11.805239 seconds Complete requests: 100 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 2058700 bytes HTML transferred: 2030600 bytes Requests per second: 8.47 [#/sec] (mean)
Tuned file system
Lap 1: 21s
Lap 2: 22s
Lap 3: Didn’t bother to do it…
ab stats:
Concurrency Level: 10 Time taken for tests: 12.102054 seconds Complete requests: 100 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 2058700 bytes HTML transferred: 2030600 bytes Requests per second: 8.26 [#/sec] (mean)
Conclusion
“Hooray.”
Though Plone/Zope crawls through of thousands of files during the start up (and thus touches their access times), the slow start-up process seem to be CPU bound. Magic file system tricks won’t make your everyday Plone development more effective.
