Thread:Project:Support desk/1.24.6 performance vs. 1.17/reply (3)

An update:

So our server uses Lighttpd, and we have Varnish for caching, and up to... well, now, we had the file cache as well. The reason for this was that the server also hosts an active forum, and that uses Varnish too, and so wiki pages do get knocked out of the cache more often than we'd like. By having the file cache in place, it allowed the server to send up a cached version when Varnish was not working correctly.

But then this perfromance problem led us to try turning the file cache off... and suddenly, problem gone. Not sure how it will work when we are under full load (last year Analytics reported 15,000 people on the site at the same time at some point, with hundreds of requests per second; load steadied at around 10-12 for the duration, which was cceptable under the circumstances), but right now we're not having any of the problems that we've had.

Which makes it look like the file cache is the problem. Any ideas of how that might be addressed, or what in 1.24.1 (vs. 1.17) might cause it? I can think of two possibilities: hardware issue preventing speedy delivery of cached pages, maybe an I/O problem, or alternatively a software issue in which Mediawiki gets stuck deciding whehter to send a cache or going to PHP for a fresh copy.