High Time-to-First-Byte with OJS 3.4.0

Software Support
1

Hi,

I installed OJS from GitHub main branch today. Unfortunately, the TTFB is quite high (~6s). I’ve one journal with 200 articles indexed.

Some details of my configuration are given below. I would appreciate any advice on where to start debugging.

Thanks.

–Andrej

OJS version 3.4.0.0
Server version: Apache/2.4.37
PHP version 8.0.13 (with PHP-FPM)

# Process manager configuration in /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf
pm.max_children = 300
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 20
pm.max_requests = 2000
2

Hi @akastrin,

OJS 3.4.0 isn’t released yet, and we have some major commits to merge before it’s ready – in the meantime it’s unsupported and unstable; I would recommend working with the stable-3_3_0 branch on Github or the released .tar.gz packages!

However, if you’re still wanting to work with OJS main for development reasons:

  • Is this just for the first hit to the page during e.g. installation? If so, there are some new compilation/caching processes that could be making this slow.
  • Can you double-check that the cache directory is writable by OJS?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

1 Like
3

We have an installation with over 3000 total papers across 4 journals. We were using the Custom Header Plugin to pop up privacy and graphics. The server would crash and stop servicing requests. Out max.children was set to 20 and we increased to 50. I see above that you have it set to 300.There are other settings above. ** Could someone, including the PKP team speak to a) what they suggest as the default settings should be and b) what would be the preferred settings especially for installations with 3000-4000 articles. Thank you!

4

pm.max_children = 300 is definitely a very high value, except you have a beefy server with a lot of memory.

There is a recent blog on optimizing PHP-FPM on https://geoligard.com/a-deeper-dive-into-optimal-php-fpm-settings

5

Thank you. That post is very helpful.

I would still like to hear from Alec on this topic. In our case, we were getting a max child error message in the PHP log file and the server stopped responding completely to any requests for that specific journal. Clearing cache and clearing template cache seemed to help but raising the max children to 50 solved the issue. This server had 8GB on a vps and the error seems to be exacerbated but javascript running in the Header Plugin.

6

I think a good indication is your /var/log/php-fpm/error.log - if it indicates several times a day to increase the limits, you should take action.

We have a 12 GB server running about 20 journals running normally with a pm.max_children value of 50. 4 GB are reserved for Solr/Lucene. Some journals have high traffic due to their size (e.g. > 2000 articles).

7

We look after some large OJS installations, among the several hundred journals we host, and usually when the lack of PHP processes to respond to requests is a symptom of another problem.

Examples: journals that use the similar articles plugin can leave the database overloaded, and so requests start queuing up in PHP until they generate the problems mentioned. Too many hits from badly behaved bots can also cause problems. One-off attacks on the server are another, less common cause in our experience.

I suggest you check what is causing so many simultaneous connections. Usually, the bottleneck is in the database, which in turn is caused by something like the example I gave.

1 Like
9

Thanks. It is only one journal and I think the cause was a poorly constructed popup in the custom header plugin.

Here is the script for those javascript and PHP experts if you want to debug it!

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10

Well that is interesting…I wanted to post the code!