More speed tests

Having been pleased with the effects of the Zend Optimizer, I began to wonder what the effects would be of running the entire MediaWiki software on the commercial Zend Core engine. Here are some samples (all times in seconds):

Page	PHP No optimization	PHPw/Optimizer	Zend Core	Wikipedia
2003 invasion of Baghdad	3.32	3.20	0.69	0.34
2003 Invasion of Iraq	20.76	5.45	6.66	4.09
Air Force Special Operations Command	1.16	0.63	0.48	0.21
World Geodetic System	1.32	1.75	1.30	0.36
United States Department of Justice	2.03	0.94	0.77	0.54
United States Air Force	6.47	7.24	2.17	1.17
The Sunshine Boys	1.93	0.82	0.62	0.37
Ruby on Rails	1.751	5.88	0.65	0.25
PowerPoint	3.99	2.07	1.24	1.68
Lee Meredith	0.85	0.53	0.37	0.18
Arnold Schwarzenegger	15	7	3.9	14.03
Philippines	25	5	5.6	3.51

Note that these are the times reported by PHP (as can be seen with the view source command on the resulting web page). Also note that the times vary significantly depending on what the server may be doing at the time. The times reported for my server are for uncached results, whereas the times reported for Wikipedia are presumably usually for cached results -- except for Arnold, it looks like I found him out of the cache this time around!

Making it fast

Until today, I have been reasonably disappointed at the speed at which the pages in my wiki have been coming up. Wikipedia uses lots of stunts which aren't really open to me, like using Squid together with lots & lots of slaved servers. Right now, I'm just running on a two-processor (2 x 3GHz Pentium) box with 2GB of memory. SQL Server, IIS, etc. are all running locally. In this configuration, pages were taking anywhere from 2 to 10 times as long to display as the corresponding pages from Wikipedia. The fix is in. I suspected that a PHP accelerator would work, and it does -- beyond my expectations. All of a sudden, this wiki is snappy! The trick is getting a PHP accelerator that works in our configuration (Windows 2003 SE, IIS 6, PHP 5, etc.) The one that does it is Zend Optimizer. It's a free download. Thanks, Zend. If you're running any PHP on IIS, give it a try. I think you'll be impressed. Here are some example timings for my wiki, along with times from wikipedia.org:

Page title	Time before optimizer	Time after optimizer	Wikipedia time
Philippines	25 seconds	5 seconds	4 seconds
Arnold Schwarzenegger	15 seconds	7 seconds	5 seconds