Is Zend Performance Suite Worth It?
 

I am looking into it, is it worth the purchase?

Thanks,
Jay D.

We run Zend, and it works great for us, plus the Zend guys are awesome!!!:thumbsup

Did you really see the improvements that they claim?

Zend is a stand up company & yes there is a difference

Yes it sure is worth it.

:thumbsup

Thanks Deepai, Chris, and phpslave. I think I am going to give it a try. Well see how she goes.

J

Zend Performance Suite is definately worth the money.

I had one detailed report by day for a month that was very intensive as it pulled many stats from many tables, crunched numbers and displayed them. Before ZPS it took about 1-3 minutes to run. After ZPS it took about 10 seconds to run.

So you can imagine the impact it could have with delivering content to your users faster if you use lots of php as i alwasy do.

I have used it on multiple servers and I was helping them beta test some new products as well (Zend Download Server). I think the product is very good.

The products work like a charm, their caching is good, their support rocks and I have seen first hand improvements with the performance of the servers. The new Zend Download Server product will be sweet when its production as it offloads your current webserver from serving things like movies, which means if your apache is set to serve 500 simultaneous sessions currently (including serving movies etc), the Download Server will allow you to server more users because when a movie is served it gets served via ZDS and not apache, thus freeing up another apache slot.

All in all I like Zend and their ZPS/ZDS products.

Andy

fire your programmers

word.

it will reduce alot of costs and give you the best performance of PHP!!! you won't regret it!

ZEND guys are really awesome!
TechSupport is the Best!

I assume you are asking about Zend Performance Suite (the one with the cache license)

Depends on your setup & sites, because you cannot cache some stuff.

For example, if your php script needs to displays time by seconds or you'll need current copy of mysql data you cannot cache those (or just those parts in scripts).

If you do, they will continue show same data for 360 seconds (you can change that). When timed out, they'll update those data again.

Also you should not cache POST & GET operations.

Zend has a very nice Small Business promo going on if your revenue is less than $250k / year ..

I love Zend Studio for programming ..

Actually, alot of the site is db driven. With the db updated on almost every page that is displayed. Along with a ad system.

In that case you have two options.

1) You can lower the default 360 seconds timeout value. Lower value = less performace becuase it regenerates the cache copy every x seconds you'll set. Also that's not an option if you'll need realtime updates from the DB

2) You can cache just the portion of scripts (The parts that doesn't needs DB queries or at least live queries). But you'll need the edit each .php file that needs live data to be able to do that.

this is not how the zend performance suite works .. this used to be the case with the first suite .. but not anymore ..

zend is awesome .. really improves the php performance.. and the guys that running are kool .. especially david :thumbsup

zend is just a part of the correct solution for you .. I would say 10 % ..

the rest is that your whole framework is setup to fit your needs ..

crucial parts of the performance issues are server setups (a correct hdparm command , a correct kernel compilation, mysql replication ... ) , database structure , template engine etc.

zend is just on top when you have a framework that actually works ..

How do you think it works with phpAdsNew? That is if you are familiar with it. I realize it has ton's of updates per display.

I guess I will have try it to see what happens.

Are you sure about that? I'm using ZPS 3.6.0a and it's still that way.

Yhea it's basically going every part of the server(s) and getting each part to work.

So far, hardware is in place. The db is optimized. Apache is lookin pretty good. It's about time to go over the code, but besides that I am running pretty good. I guess I am just trying to sqeeze s some more juice outta that beauch.

I disagree on this, however you it all depends on the setup. You can do partial page caching on the querries you need to be less dynamic, and you can tell it how long to cache everything your not limited to 360 seconds at all. Example we display a stats summary on every page for our users, this has a lot of querries in it there is no reason to go to the db everytime for this data, so I've cached it on a 5 min interval which has greatly decreased the load on the slave mysql servers used to produce this data.

As for caching GET options, you might want to cache get options to a page, depending on the situation, now if it's somethign like a join form your obviously not going to want to cache that.

as for caching the time? what would you benifit by this no real load benifits there, and if you did cache the time maybe cache it so it's relevant to the rest of the cached data.

I am dealing with David, and did I really put him through the ringers! Great guy though.

weird .. maybe contact zend support and ask them ..

Yes he is :thumbsup

Ask what? Those are clearly described in the included pdf e-book. I could post the book itself if there isn't "No part of this manual may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval systems, for any purpose other than the purchaser?s personal use, without the written permission of Zend Technologies Ltd." part :)

As I know current suite adds partial caching support to help those issues which I've also mentioned. What else in there? I really like to know as it might also help me.

How do you code for partiall cache?

You should realy join their small business program. Which will give you access to Zend Studio, Zend Encoder & Zend Accelerator (Performace suite without cache license).

Accelerator itself is also helpfull for speeding things up without any of the cache issues. (but of course not as much as ZPS)

Then I would take thier ZPS and test it to see if it helps at your own setup. :thumbsup

having hardware in place and getting the most out of it is a big difference ..

first (if you use IDE Hds) .. what is the result of hdparm -tT /dev/hda1 .. (or whatever you mount your hd to) .. ?

the database is the crucial part and I bet that your performance could be at least 500 % higher in optimizing it .. just a stupid example regarding locking issues on a busy system ... Wrong: Delete from table where tableID = xyz .. right: insert xyz into tableB... select * from table right outer join tableB on table.xyz = tableB.xyz ..

setting right indexes can improve performance significantly .. using wrong indexes will reduce it .. and I bet that your db structure is full with indexes that are not used at all and just slow your system down .. having the right multicolumn indexes is the key ..

ok, this post could be endless ..



http://dev.mysql.com has some VERY interesting articles .. but .. you need to read them very thourughly and be fluent in sql to understand them ..

I'm sure you probably already have these but,

they have some online seminars as well
ZPS-iseminar

Live Demo

ZPS home

also note that if you key on two or more items example (id, name, date), you should select in that order as well in order to use these indexes correctly, or so i was told at mysql training, lol.

you can do a desc then your statement in the client to see how your using the indexes and in which order the preformance is best.

also with mysql your table type selectoin is important depending on the situation for each table. (lots of inserts very few selects, lots of inserts/updates and selects, etc...)

INNODB is fine for some but Innodb (row level instead of table level locking) is better for other situations.

Thanks, when I get my user/pass I will look into it.

Thanks for everyone's comments, this has actually be an productive thread.

nice tip, as it makes sense as you move down the row.

I use EXPLAIN on the queries to see how good/bad they are.

correct ..

explain will show you which indexes are used ..

this is a VERY GOOD book that everybody should read before starting the next project:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hpmysql/index.html

yah explain or desc will do the same thing (desc is shorter and i'm lazy), well at leaste they do on my version of mysql.

Glad i could help.

got that book next to my recliner at home, love it. ordered it in feb had to wait quite a while for it to come out, lol.

You're welcome (for my part). I hope it goes well for you :thumbsup

Definately worth it :thumbsup

However also depends on what situation you're in. If you run a low-traffic site with one webserver, I doubt it will help you as much as it does us on IwantU (high traffic and load, running from 15 webservers).

I see that in my very near future.

15 webservers ? ... you are doing something wrong ..

a friend of mine runs his large dating site off one web- and one databaseserver .. (P4 2,8 ghz with 2 gig ram each) ..

he has more than 800,000 page impressions each day , plus it is not just a cheap dating site but based upon a "yes/no" system where only a match can write a match ..

so go figure 25 million votes in one table being selected on several inner joins against other tables with 14+ million votes in one query on a super busy cheap webserver .. the query executes in less than 0.1 seconds and the load is rarely above 0.8 ..

this is what I call performance and being cost productive ..


the success and costs of a project is based on the database structure ..

btw, the free turck mm cache is used on his server and not zend ps ..


15 webservers? .. my advice again: fire your programmers ..

The webservers are also shared for some of our other websites....however IwantU is most of the load.

The databases could probably only run from one (with another for backup/redundancy purposes), with the exception of browsing which is the biggest load. Running it from a few databases using mysql's native replication, it never has any lag / problems.

Pageviews alone don't determine the hit on the servers though. In your friend's case, perhaps he has barely any features on his site (from what you wrote above), thus having very low concurrent connections. In our case, for example, just our interface to chat/IM/webcam will require more resources than a simple yes/no messaging system like your friend has.