realistic deployability

bazaarboy

just wondering what you guys think about my situation -
i've been developing a web app for about 3 years, and over this time more and more users have been getting involved.
it runs on a virtual WinXP Pro machine, on WAMP5 - within an intranet environment

currently the number of users has grown to over 1200, and the system is accessed about 5000 times per day
the users have a secured / authenticated sessions, and the system generates reports - pdf documents, bitmap images etc

so, its quite a busy little system - and I'm no programming pro by any stretch of the imagination...

recently the system activity has gone up by about 30% (to the levels shown above) and I've been getting random crashes. the IT crowd at work have been suggesting various ideas about what the problem is, eg:

WinXP Pro cant handle so many TCP connections
WAMP5 shouldnt be used as a live system environment
the firewall/AV software is causing the crashes
client machines' browser software is making illegal calls to the server

Any general comments and suggestions are appreciated!
or if you need further clarification - just ask!
thanks

dagon

how long is a piecve of sting, how much time to you have spare?

I would move it on to Linux box, Linux just handles everything better and especially in networking and scalability.

But since you don't actully know where the errors specificity lay, any offered solution is a guess. So if your dedicated to the current platform, working out the source of the issues is step 1.

bazaarboy

thanks - there have been a number of different issues, most of which I did manage to solve.

For example - upgrading to php 5.3.0 caused random crashes, which bizarrely produced no entry in the mysql / apache / php error logs. The crashes were so frequent I had no option but to revert back to WAMP5 version 1.7.3
Interestingly, on the development platform (identical) php 5.3.0 appeared ok.

Another example is the max_threads setting. In the past, 250 seemed to be ok, but after an episode where mysql slowed right down, I increased it to 500. Since then the slow-down hasn't occurred.

I guess what I'm asking is - without migrating to a new environment (eg linux or setting up the a m and p services manually), does my current set-up have viability?
Or, is there something about it that is inherently incompatible with large scale use by users?
(a further 50-200% increase in activity is planned for the future)...

NogDog

WAMP by itself is neither better or worse than installing the pieces separately: you still end up installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Whether or not its default configuration is the best for your particular environment and application is another question, and is as easily adjusted as it would be if you installed it manually (maybe easier, since many changes can be done via the WAMP GUI).

One question: are you using persistent MySQL connections in your PHP code? My experience has been that doing so is generally counter-productive (contrary to expectations). You only gain from it if everything is "just so" in your web server, PHP, and MySQL configuration; if not you actually risk worse performance and possible crashes due to orphaned processes.

bazaarboy

I avoid persistent db connections - i use a callout to connect to mysql if needed in a script and at the end, another function closes the connection...