Everyone,<br><br><br>I was doing some thinking this weekend about the overall goal of making Koha perform faster.  We&#39;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.<br>
<br>Tuning &amp; Hardware (<a href="http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_Tuning_Guide">http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_Tuning_Guide</a>)<br><ul><li>Hardware selection guide (how much CPU, RAM and disk to run Koha on)<br>
</li><li>Tuning the operating system</li><li>Tuning Apache<br></li><li>Tuning MySQL<br></li></ul>Performance tools<br><ul><li>Alternate, Persistent Perl interpreters, like Plack/PSGI or mod_perl/FastCGI (<a href="http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack">http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Plack</a>)<br>
</li><li>Alternate webservers like Nginx or Starman<br></li><li>caching tools like memcached or T:T cache<br></li></ul>Code cleanup<br><ul><li>Denesting dependencies</li><li>Optimizing SQL queries</li><li>Dual database handles (readonly, read/write)<br>
</li><li>Simplifying code</li><li>Minimizing XML parsing<br></li></ul>Network latency<br><ul><li>AJAX calls for key functions like circ (cheaper to send/receive than full page loads)</li><li>Minifying JS and CSS (<a href="http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=1918">http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=1918</a>)<br>
</li><li>CSS sprites (<cite><a href="http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/">css-tricks.com/css-sprites/</a>)</cite></li><li>caching some data client-side (like user preferences) in cookies or localStorage<br></li></ul>Ergonomics<br>
<ul><li>Fewer clicks to do common actions</li><li>Display important info more prominently</li><li>Preferences to customize to individuals&#39; workflows<br></li></ul><p><br></p><p>Now, here&#39;s the question:  which of these techniques will net us the biggest boosts for the least effort?  We&#39;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&#39;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.</p>
<p>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&#39;re lucky in this community in that we have many, many kinds of expertise, so we&#39;re not limited to pursuing any one course at a time, but having a coordinated effort would help us reap more tangible benefits sooner.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p><p><br></p><p>-Ian<br></p>