I manage a site covinasunriserotary.com that has been running Couch for about 5 years with virtually no maintenance (other than content). That's the good news. The bad news is that it is VERY slow. Every page takes about 15 seconds to load, even with my 200mbps connection. I don't know what version of Couch it's running (where to find it?), but I do know that there have been quite a few tweaks of the system and there's a lot of php code in the pages for special items.

So I'm thinking that maybe updating the site to the latest version (2.2?) may improve its performance. Question is, what's the procedure to do this upgrade? Has it been documented anywhere? What files/folders will be affected in the upgrade (and maybe restored if the update fails).

And mainly, can I expect to see any significant performance improvements if I do it?

[KK]

Hi,

Apropos the slowness you mentioned, there could be two reasons -
1. the custom code being used is inefficient
2. the hardware (server) running the code is inefficient

I cannot comment on the first part as that would require an audit to identify the blocks of code that are non-performant.

As for the second, I can see that the site in question is on a shared hosting with 59 more sites co-located on the same server.
With a server catering to these many sites, it is hardly surprising you are getting the kind of performance you mentioned.

That is to say, with the current setup, it wouldn't make much difference even with upgrading to the latest version of Couch so let us discount that as an option.

The best thing to do would be to get a good VPS and move your site there - this alone should make all the difference.

In case, that is not an option at the moment, then please at least turn on Couch's caching -
to do that, edit couch/config.php, find the following block and set the directive to '1' (as shown) -

Code: Select all

// 9.
// If set, CMS will cache generated pages and serve them if possible.
define( 'K_USE_CACHE', 1 );

For logged-in admins, this won't make any difference as caching does not apply to them.
For rest of the world, you should see a perceptible difference in performance (try accessing any page more than once to test this - the first time the page gets generated normally but after that it is served from the cache).

Please try and let me know it it helps.

Thanks for the quick reply, Kamran. The cache idea DID help quite a bit with most pages for non-admins. I believe it's because the content is constructed just before the page can be delivered. The old static website (covinasunriserotary.com/oldsite) is much faster from the same server. There still are a couple of sluggish areas that I'm going to have to examine more. I'm concerned about caching though, because as content is updated, I want to make sure that old info is not delivered to the user. I don't understand the process well enough to know how and when it works.

[KK]

I'm concerned about caching though, because as content is updated, I want to make sure that old info is not delivered to the user.

Don't worry about that - Couch takes care of busting the cache whenever new content is added.