Everyone, I was doing some thinking this weekend about the overall goal of making Koha perform faster. We're approaching this from several different angles, so I thought it might be a good idea to come up with a summary of all the various methods we could use to speed Koha up. Tuning & Hardware (http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_Tuning_Guide) - Hardware selection guide (how much CPU, RAM and disk to run Koha on) - Tuning the operating system - Tuning Apache - Tuning MySQL Performance tools - Alternate, Persistent Perl interpreters, like Plack/PSGI or mod_perl/FastCGI (http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack) - Alternate webservers like Nginx or Starman - caching tools like memcached or T:T cache Code cleanup - Denesting dependencies - Optimizing SQL queries - Dual database handles (readonly, read/write) - Simplifying code - Minimizing XML parsing Network latency - AJAX calls for key functions like circ (cheaper to send/receive than full page loads) - Minifying JS and CSS ( http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=1918) - CSS sprites (css-tricks.com/css-sprites/) - caching some data client-side (like user preferences) in cookies or localStorage Ergonomics - Fewer clicks to do common actions - Display important info more prominently - Preferences to customize to individuals' workflows Now, here's the question: which of these techniques will net us the biggest boosts for the least effort? We've got lots of great work on Plack so far, but would figuring out the perfect MySQL tuning settings be easier and give us a similar performance enhancement (I don't know, just using as an example)? Some of these are of course inter-related; doing code cleanup and denesting would make it easier to do AJAX calls or use mod_perl. I should probably dump this into a wiki page, but I wanted to raise the issue on-list first. Does anyone have any data that we could use to determine what above is low-hanging fruit, or what will get the biggest gains? We're lucky in this community in that we have many, many kinds of expertise, so we're not limited to pursuing any one course at a time, but having a coordinated effort would help us reap more tangible benefits sooner. Cheers, -Ian