HIGH PERFORMANCE FOR MEDIA WEBSITE Pierre Jean Duvivier Responsable WebFactory Edipresse SA

WHAT IS A « BIG MEDIA WEBSITE » ?

TDG.CH 50’000 unique visitor by day – up to 400’000 pages views by day 100 native edipresse news by day + breaking news via AFP, ATS

24 HEURES.CH 35’000 unique visitor by day – up to 300’000 pages views by day 100 news every day + external feed like ATP, AFS

LEMATIN.CH 80’000 unique visitor by day – up to 500’000 pages views by day > 100 news by days + external Feed of all edipresse’s website

WHAT IS GOOD PERFORMANCES ? Stable . It means that website is online during the maximum of time. 100 % is the maximum. A good rate is > 99.5 % Fast . It means that page are downloaded quickly by users. A good rate < 5-7 s « Right » Cost . It means that you have the right cost for the best result.

OUR WORST PROBLEMS

Global Architecture for 11 websites and 190’000 uniques visitors by day Free & Simple well known solution (apache, mysql) to lower the complexity to maintain it (cost and knowledge) Group fonctionnalities to make economy. Use Firewall to do load balancing Spécialization : FrontEnd (Apache) Database (MySQL) Cache Server (MemCache) NFS (Binaries)

Free & Simple well known solution (apache, mysql) to lower the complexity to maintain it (cost and knowledge)

Group fonctionnalities to make economy. Use Firewall to do load balancing

Spécialization :

FrontEnd (Apache)

Database (MySQL)

Cache Server (MemCache)

NFS (Binaries)

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE FOR 190’000 uniques visitors by days (RED)

The max number of connections. What happen : with a lot of users, each user when he surf on a webpage launch severals calls to apache. (to retreive css, jpg, ect…) opening one connection each time. ( Image represent more than 66 % of the bandwith and a large part of this call) Problem : Apache & Mysql can accept only a limited number of connection Symptom for users : Users are queued and the time to load a page increase.

Images consume a lof of ressources And connections

Solutions to manage the Max number of connection DIVIDE THE TASKS BETWEEN YOUR SERVERS WORK WITH THE HTTP PROTOCOL (EXPIRY) BECAREFULL WITH ERROR PAGES (404, 310.ect..)

Database Load Problem What happen : webmaster and user(s) use a lot database access for all the action inside our CMS. Problem : Databases servers overload when a lot of queries come. Symptom for users : Instability : website don’t work for users and journalist / webmaster.

Solutions to manage the database load problem

PEAK TRAFIC PROBLEM TRAFIC ON MEDIA WEBSITE IS NOT UNIFORM DURING THE DAY. THE MOST IMPORTANT TRAFIC IS SUPPORTED BETWEEN 8H and 10H.

HOW TO MANAGE WITH THE PEAK PROBLEM ? We have still problem with this peak and we did not find the « right » solution

What solution(s) we don’t use to manage performance problem ? SOLUTIONS WHAT IS IT ? WHY ? Reverse proxy like Squid, Varnish, Apache modProxy … It replace the front end servers serving a page already in html « cached » We will increase system complexity then cost. No so easy to setup and maintain it Alternative PHP Cache Compilation des scripts PHP We didn’t test it for the moment. An option in the future Amazon network cache system (S3) or Akamai You use a lot of servers in network (or p2p) to deliver your content We are interested to use Amazon s3 to server our image…next upgrade

What solution(s) we don’t use to manage performance problem ? SOLUTIONS WHAT IS IT ? WHY ? Reverse proxy like Squid, Varnish, Apache modProxy … It replace the front end servers serving a page already in html « cached » We will increase system complexity then cost. No so easy to setup and maintain it Alternative PHP Cache Compilation des scripts PHP We didn’t test it for the moment. An option in the future Amazon network cache system (S3) or Akamai You use a lot of servers in network (or p2p) to deliver your content We are interested to use Amazon s3 to server our image…next upgrade