Performance ... your experience ?

[mac27]

haven't installed the script yet, but I've made some research on ajax/chat stuff and found that:

http://www.chabotc.nl/phpsocketdaemon/

[Beni]

Just wanted you to know: run a achat with 100 chatting users in 4 rooms (JMeter simulated) on a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ with 2Gig Ram (900M used) with a load of 12-14, but the server is not much laggy and pretty good to use (5-6 secs latency)

The nicks send a line every 1-10 secs (min max, average is therefore 5 seks)
I have several proxys doing mysql lookups running, so plain performance will be better.

[Klinky]

I have found a way to improve performance if you have access to MySQL, but do not have access to shared memory or a ramdisk.

MySQL has a table type called "HEAP" or "MEMORY" which keeps the table in constant memory until the server is shutdown.

I made the following changes to mysql.class.php in the containers folder:

$cfg["mysql_fieldtype_server"] = 'varchar(32)';
$cfg["mysql_fieldtype_group"] = 'varchar(64)';
$cfg["mysql_fieldtype_subgroup"] = 'varchar(128)';
$cfg["mysql_fieldtype_leaf"] = 'varchar(128)';
$cfg["mysql_fieldtype_leafvalue"] = 'varchar(255)';
$cfg["mysql_fieldtype_timestamp"] = 'int(11)';
$cfg["mysql_engine"] = 'Memory';

The reason you have to use 'varchar' instead of 'text' is that the 'MEMORY' table type doesn't support the 'text' or 'blob' data formats. The limitation here is that leafvalue cannot be longer than the 255 character varchar limit. If you're running MySQL 5.0.3 or greater, varchar can be 16bits and will allow up to 65535 characters - unfortunately I don't have access to 5.0.3, so I also set
'$params["max_text_len"] = 200;' to lessen the chance that messages could go over the character limit. Though I am not sure how often this situation would occur in normal use where command + message is greater than 255 characters.

Your mileage may vary !

Edit: I did some tests and it appears MySQL will just truncate anything that occurs after character 255 if someone tries to input something greater. I think the vast majority of chat phrases will be less than 255 characters.

[phpfreechat]

Thank you Klinky for this tip. However, to complete your tip, if you don't want to modify the original source code, you just have to specify these parameters in your chat script :

Code: Select all

$params["container_cfg_mysql_fieldtype_server"] = 'varchar(32)';
$params["container_cfg_mysql_fieldtype_group"] = 'varchar(64)';
$params["container_cfg_mysql_fieldtype_subgroup"] = 'varchar(128)';
$params["container_cfg_mysql_fieldtype_leaf"] = 'varchar(128)';
$params["container_cfg_mysql_fieldtype_leafvalue"] = 'varchat(255)';
$params["container_cfg_mysql_fieldtype_timestamp"] = 'int(11)';
$params["container_cfg_mysql_engine"] = 'Memory';

[husooz]

kerphi !! did you fix the optimizing problems? can i install the script? i am using vps server and i only can use %25 cpu..

[NatyALC]

Have anyone tried to adapt PCF to use memcache to improve performance?

If you don't know, memcache is a distributed and volatile RAM storage engine.
http://www.danga.com/memcached/

[Sonya*]

Hello,

I have the possibility to run the chat with and without mysql. I have not found the information which method is generally better for the performance? Have you any experience?

Thank you.
Sonya

[citricsquid]

150 people overloaded my server

[OldWolf]

Impressive number of people.

[citricsquid]

It was pretty good.
I set it up in a rush for a website i am a member of, as their chat is down.
The site is in the top 500 Alexa ranked sites :3

But yeah, i didn't expect so many people, it somehow crashed my VPS haha.
Modifying the chat now, it's going to rock.

phpfreechat is ace, ily guys

[Klinky]

Well just as an update today I had an extreme usage case. I host www.blazersgamechat.com which is a chat site for my Portland Trail Blazers(NBA team). Today was the NBA Draft were teams select new players from college/international. At least 86 people were in the chat at one time. The chat was fine, but just about an hour ago they shutdown the script due to excessive resource usage. It had been running all day long. They have released the restriction since everyone pretty much timed out and thus usage went way down. This was on a 16 Core(4 x Q6600(4 cores each) 2.2Ghz CPUs) & 4GB of RAM. I was using the MySQL wrapper & v1.1 of phpFreeChat.

So phpFreeChat is fine if you're going to for small rooms, if you're expecting dozens or hundreds of people be prepared to have some insane system.

[OldWolf]

Well, to be clear, phpfreechat isn't meant to have so many users running on a shared server. :/

If you had a dedicated server, you probably would have been just fine.

[redrum]

Hello,

I have just installed PFC at my Website www.karsten-hens.de and have been with a whole schoolclass of 28 pupils at the same time in the chat. There have been no problems with the performance. Everybody has been logged in without big problems. I didn't expect this.

Congratulations and thank you!!!

karsten

may i know what provider do you use for the chat?

thanks

[redrum]

Kerphi,

Do you think 5 to 10 users in a single chatroom on a shared host will hurt anything?

im using a free hosting and it goes fine for 10 users, but when it goes beyond 10 users
the server lagged..

[OldWolf]

That's unsurprising for free hosting...